Earlier this month, The U.S. News & World Report released its annual rankings for the top online graduate programs nationwide. The Heider College of Business’ online graduate programs received four distinguished rankings, notably landing themselves in the top 10 percent of all online MBA programs. 

Creighton’s online MBA program achieved the #33 spot out of 366 total schools. According to Eric Neuman, the Assistant Dean of Graduate Programs, it is a great accomplishment for the business school.  

“[The MBA] is kind of the gold standard of business school graduate education. When you think of that, you think of the MBA. So, the fact that [we are] able to offer this online graduate program and achieve that ranking and have a lot of good students come, it’s terrific.” Neuman said 

The other three rankings included two subsets of the MBA, as well as an overall ranking for all of Creighton’s other online graduate business programs excluding the MBA. The two specialized MBA programs that received rankings were the Finance MBA, and the Business analytics MBA, both achieving number eight out of 21 and 24 schools.  

The overall online business program’s ranking was #39 out of 221 schools. Included in this ranking is the Master of Finance (MFIN), Master of Financial Planning and Financial Psychology, Master of Investment Management and Financial Analysis (MIMFA), and Master of Science in Business Analytics (MS-BA).  

Neuman said he believes that these rankings are reflective of everything the business school has spent years building.  

“It validates what we’re trying to do- the type of program we’re trying to run, the students that we attract, the instructors that teach in the program.” Neuman said.  

The program currently has 287 students, with around 16-25 students in each class. The classes are taught mostly by full-time undergraduate faculty in an asynchronous structure. The students are given deadlines but have the freedom to watch lectures and complete assignments on their own time. This structure works to accommodate the busy and diverse schedules of the graduate business students.  

According to Neuman, Creighton’s graduate business program is distinct because of their effort to simulate an in-person experience.  

“We’re trying to take the experience that we have face-to-face and recreate that in an online environment.” Neuman said.  

This is reflected through their effort to build community between students and professors, their high expectations for students and their commitment to Jesuit values.  

According to Chris Karasek, the Assistant Dean for Student Pathways for the Graduate Programs, the professors work hard to foster close relationships with online students.  

Neuman, who teaches a capstone course for the graduate programs, said that in an online class setting, he likes to post plenty of videos of himself and host zoom sessions to make the classes more personal.  

Another important aspect of fostering the student-teacher relationships, Karasek said, is being readily available to the students through office hours, responding quickly to emails, and personal advising. 

In addition to the close relationships between the faculty and students, the professors also try to connect the students with one another through synchronous group work.  

“There’s also times where there’s some synchronous stuff, whether that’s doing group projects, or getting together for small group discussion, or having a live session over Zoom that everybody’s logging into and someone like me is leading everyone in case discussion.” Neuman said.  

Neuman mentioned that just like Creighton’s in-person classes, the online programs maintain high standards for their students. 

“We want to make sure that our standards may remain high, you know, like we’ve got expectations on what we expect out of our students,” Neuman said.  

The online graduate programs also make an effort to emulate the Jesuit values in their education. 

“Just like our undergraduate program has ethics requirements, all of our graduate programs have ethics requirements, which aligns with universities overall goals.” Neuman said. “We’re all here for a reason. We’re all here because we like what Creighton and the Heider College of Business stand for on the basis of values and the Jesuit nature of our school.”