How much does a top-ranked EMBA course cost? Gradia crunched the numbers
An online executive course costs €95, or a little over $1,000, at the median. Put an executive in the room instead of on a screen, and that number jumps to €3,825 ($4,368) – roughly four times as much. Pick a strategy or leadership program over one on governance or finance, and the price climbs further still.
Those are the topline findings of a new report from Gradia, an online catalog for executive education programs, built from 2,750 scheduled courses at 37 business schools. Asked how those numbers stack up against the executive education market as a whole, however, and Gradia’s managing director offered a full accounting of exactly how narrow his own dataset is – and why.
“It’s a strong, well-defined slice, and it leans European, and within Europe German-speaking, because of where we’ve done the work so far,” says Tobias Plewka. “The market itself doesn’t look like that.”
Here’s what the report shows, and what Plewka says it can and can’t tell you.
THE HEADLINE NUMBERS
The median price across all 2,750 scheduled courses is €2,800, or around $3,190 at current exchange rates, with the middle half of programs priced between €1,150 and €6,100. In-person courses still account for the bulk of scheduled offerings, 69%, against 29% online and 2% hybrid.
Currency adds another wrinkle: dollar-priced programs in the catalog carry a higher median ($5,900) than euro-priced ones, as do Swiss-franc programs (CHF 6,900). Gradia cautions that this reflects which specific programs happen to be priced in which currency – longer, more expensive residential programs skew dollar and franc-denominated – rather than any real difference in what a course costs on either side of the Atlantic.
A SMALLER SLICE THAN IT LOOKS
Asked how the 37 schools in the report relate to the executive education market as a whole, Plewka is direct: they don’t, at least not in a representative sense.
There is no official census of executive education providers, but accreditation offers the closest thing to one. Pulling the public directories of the three major international accreditors, Plewka counts roughly 1,400 business schools worldwide holding at least one of AACSB, EQUIS, or AMBA accreditation – AACSB alone accounts for more than 1,000 of those – spread across some 90 countries, with the United States home to the largest share, at around 560 schools.
Gradia’s own catalog is a “deliberate top-slice” of that universe, Plewka says, not a sample of it. The company tracks 117 schools in detail, 116 of them accredited and about 80 holding all three major accreditations, the so-called “Triple Crown.” Of those 117, only 37 currently have live, published prices in the system – the schools behind the €2,800 median. All 37 are accredited, most are Triple Crown, and 34 are ranked by The Financial Times.
WHY GERMAN & WHY EUROPE
The catalog’s lean toward German-language programs – 868 scheduled offerings, second only to English’s 2,672 – is a byproduct of how Gradia built the dataset, not a signal about where executive education is concentrated, Plewka says. The company catalogs schools one at a time from their own published course pages, he says, and its coverage so far simply reflects the order in which that work got done.
In fact one school, Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, makes up close to 20% of the entire catalog.
“That’s why I’d avoid a U.S.-versus-Europe framing on our data,” Plewka says. “It says more about our sequencing than about the market.”
NO SCHOOL PAYS TO BE HERE – YET
Because Gradia is also building a business around referring prospective students to schools, it’s a fair question whether a school’s presence, or its prices, are shaped by a commercial relationship. Plewka says no: none of the 117 schools in the catalog is a paying or claimed partner today, and the company doesn’t yet have partnerships with any of them. Every price is sourced from what a school has published publicly.
The long-term model is different, though still arm’s-length on pricing, Plewka says. Gradia is positioning itself as a neutral discovery and comparison layer for executive education, with schools eventually paying for leads and traffic the platform sends their way rather than for placement or favorable numbers.
SHORT COURSES, NOT DEGREES
One scope note is worth underlining for readers weighing this against an MBA or executive MBA budget: every figure in the report is the price of a single open-enrollment executive course, not annual tuition or a degree program. And because Gradia’s price history only goes back a few months, there’s no year-over-year trend yet to say whether executive education is getting more or less expensive – that comparison, Plewka says, will come in later editions.
He describes this report as a first edition of a much larger ambition: an automated tool that pulls a school’s entire course catalog from a single link and standardizes it, which he says makes expanding from 37 schools toward the full 1,400-school accredited universe “mostly a question of scale, money, and time.” The stated goal is a neutral, Airbnb-style hub for comparing executive programs across the whole market, funded by referral fees rather than listing fees, eventually layered with an AI-driven advisor for personalized program recommendations.
For now, the €2,800 median and the pricing gaps by format and discipline are a genuine, if narrow, window into what a set of well-regarded, largely European schools charge for open-enrollment executive courses – not a market-wide benchmark.
Plewka doesn’t pretend the infrastructure is the hard part anymore, either. “We’re just getting started,” he says, “and the real challenge right now is landing this on the market.”
Read Gradia’s full report here.
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