UCLA Anderson MBA Goes Private: MBA News

The Anderson School of Management at the University of California at Los Angeles is to give up the vast majority of its state funding in the hope of living off donations and, it is thought, higher tuition fees.

The main change in a deal agreed between Anderson’s dean and the university’s provost sees the full-time UCLA Anderson MBA convert to self-supporting status for a period of three years.

Up until this point, 18% of ULCA Anderson’s budget came from state funding, according to Inside Higher Ed. This will now drop to 4%, with only a PhD program and an undergraduate minor set to continue receiving state subsidies at Anderson School of Management.

Removing the UCLA Anderson MBA from state funding will free it from adhering to regulations from above – including over any decision regarding rates of tuition. However, the school moved to assuage fears by promising that its provisions for financial aid would not be cut.

The school cited uncertainty over state budgets as the primary motivation behind the move: “UCLA Anderson proposed this plan to avoid any additional cuts in state funding while increasing predictability in setting fee levels and flexibility to faculty assignments,” said UCLA Anderson’s senior associate dean of finance and operations, Jami Jesek for Inside Higher Ed.

Plans to maintain financial aid yet to be confirmed

Guarantees that the UCLA Anderson MBA won’t see a drop in financial aid provisions as a result of the new arrangement are yet to be backed up with a concrete plan. But Jesek said that the intention was to increase the level of financial aid on offer; indeed, this is one of the central aims of the school’s five-year fundraising campaign.

Yet a team organized by UCLA’s academic senate did express concerns that current financial aid policy on the UCLA Anderson MBA might leave some students out in the cold if prices rose – as there is no clear indication that financial aid levels would rise in accordance with any tuition hike.

A further doubt was raised by one former UCLA Anderson faculty member: “It’s not pure gravy because if you’re charging students a lot more, they tend to expect a lot more in terms of services,” professor emeritus, Daniel J.B. Mitchell, said.

However, the school expects its newly-found independence to yield greater resources and Sunil Kumar, dean at Chicago Booth, wrote in support of the move that this would allow UCLA Anderson to grant more, not less, financial aid as well as to improve what its faculty could offer students.

Although only confirmed last week, the move, first mooted back in 2010, had been expected since last summer when approval was granted by the university as a whole. Although, there are already in excess of 50 programs at UCLA that have ‘self-supporting’ status, including Anderson’s EMBA program, this is thought to be the first UCLA program to switch its status from receiving state funding to go it alone. But, this kind of move is not without precedent elsewhere, with Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia also freeing up some of its graduate programs from state funding and the regulations that come with it.