The Evening M.B.A. Program takes education directly to business

Great leaders know exactly when to seize opportunity. They don’t wait for board meetings. They broker deals at backyard barbecues, while jogging, and at neighborhood cafés. In this case, it was on a bus headed back from Cedar Rapids to Iowa City.

It was 1994. Gary Fethke, dean of the Henry B. Tippie College of Business at The University of Iowa, had taken the college’s advisory council on a tour of the new Cedar Rapids facility for the Tippie School of Management’s Evening M.B.A. Program. It was state-of-the-art: sleek and spacious, with the latest classroom technology, a computer lab, student lounge, and a professional-quality meeting room.

Leonard Hadley, then CEO of Maytag in Newton, was so impressed he decided on the spot that his region needed an Evening M.B.A. site of its own–and The University of Iowa business education that went along with it.

"On the way back, Len started hammering on me about wanting M.B.A. classes offered in Newton," Fethke recalls. "As soon as we got back, he called up Hunter Rawlings [then president of the University] and, with a little help from the governor, they pushed that initiative through. Hadley even made a personal gift of more than $100,000 to help us get started on the classroom. That’s how much he believed in our program and what it could do for his business."

A year later, the Evening M.B.A. Program began offering classes in its new facility on the Newton Polytechnic campus.

Created to serve mid-career professionals seeking an M.B.A. in the Quad Cities, the Evening M.B.A. Program has a rich history of working with Iowa’s business community since 1966. Today, the nearly 700 students attending classes represent 260 companies, and the majority have their tuition paid by their employers.

"We are providing the gold standard business education for middle management in central and eastern Iowa," says Gary Gaeth, associate dean of the business college. "We’re helping the state of Iowa retain its best people by providing a nationally recognized M.B.A. that can be obtained right here in a convenient fashion."

Convenient because the program actually brings education directly to students. Faculty travel to five sites in Davenport, Newton, Cedar Rapids, and Des Moines to conduct classes in the evenings and on weekends. The program is designed to be flexible and to conform to the schedules of people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who are busy cultivating their careers and raising families.

The Tippie School of Management’s M.B.A. is the only ranked M.B.A. program in the state, consistently placing in the top 50 on lists published by Business Week, U.S. News & World Report, and Forbes.

"Of all the M.B.A. degrees offered in the state, this is the one with prestige," says Abram Tubbs, president and CEO of Tri-County Bank & Trust in Cascade, and a 1999 graduate of the program. "Prospective students tend to know that an Iowa M.B.A. is a real asset."

Over the past 35 years, the evening program has expanded steadily, always in response to demand. The creation of the Newton site, for example, had one unanticipated outcome: by 1997, Gaeth says, they realized 60 percent of M.B.A. students were driving there from Des Moines. So in 1998, the program began offering classes at the Krause Center for Entrepreneurial Study in Des Moines. During 1999, they added a second site, in the newly developed downtown Des Moines Higher Education Center.

Hadley, who has retired from his post at Maytag but still consults with the company, remains a strong supporter of the Evening M.B.A. Program.

"As a Fortune 500 employer, Maytag seeks to provide first-class benefits," he says. "One of those offerings at our corporate headquarters is the Iowa M.B.A. Program, ranked among the top 35 business programs in the country. Our alliance with the University supports our mission of seeking the best talent and retaining tomorrow’s leaders."