By Chad Halcom and Lekan Oguntoyinbo
Triage or tennis?
College graduates can arm themselves with the knowledge to manage patient care or recreation programs thanks to more options for health care education and niche degrees that are cropping up in college course listings.
Health care expands
Madonna University's course offerings include an executive MBA degree for health care professionals in China. As China reorients its health care system from one that simply dictates where people can go for treatment to one that offers choices, Madonna is teaching medical doctors and health care managers such basics of business as accounting, economics and marketing.
At Oakland University, a relatively new doctoral degree program in physical therapy has grown from 30 or so students less than four years ago to about 100 in the most recent year, said Virinder Moudgil, senior vice president of academic affairs and provost.
“We have found every student getting the graduate degree gets a job even before they have completed the program,” he said. “Not only is it growing for us, and in the need for our students, but the demand is definitely there in the market because of the rate of absorption of students.”
An anticipated critical physician shortage in Michigan, amid an exploding health care demand in future years, was a main reason the Michigan State University Board of Trustees approved last year expanding its College of Osteopathic Medicine to two satellite locations, at the Detroit Medical Center and at Macomb Community College.
Since that decision, MSU has sought and obtained accreditation from the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement and has entered into lease agreements for the two satellite buildings, said William Strampel, dean of osteopathic medicine.
Construction likely will begin before the end of June to remodel the sites for medical school instruction. Officials at the Commission on Osteopathic College Accreditation will likely review MSU's progress before making its final ruling on accreditation by late summer, Strampel said.
If that body, which already has extended a preliminary approval, gives formal accreditation, Strampel hopes to complete admissions in time for the first class of students to attend the satellites by July 2009. In all, the expansions will increase the incoming medical school class from 200 to 300, including 50 at each satellite.
“This is for us an overall class-size expansion to accommodate a greater need,” Strampel said. “The students in every building will all be Michigan State University students in everything that means in terms of access to our campuses and resources.”
At the University of Michigan, a recent grant to the UM School of Public Health is behind a new interdisciplinary doctoral training program in public health and aging.
And, Eastern Michigan University is preparing a new interdisciplinary doctor of philosophy degree program in nursing education by cooperation between the College of Education and the School of Nursing. Classes start in 2009 and reflect an attempt to alleviate the bottleneck of training for new nurses due to a lack of educators, said Barbara Sheffer, manager of the degree program.
Finding a niche
A variety of other specialized programs by business schools or through business school partnerships with other colleges within universities are all about moving away from theory to providing specific knowledge.
“What we're trying to do here is recognize that with an increasingly competitive environment, we need to move away from situations of programs being redundant,” said Dave Nicol, dean of Ferris State University's College of Business, where program offerings include degrees in golf program management, music industry management and a recently launched program on information security and intelligence.
“We want to produce programs with distinctiveness that offer the marriage of the theoretical and the practical.”
Nicol, the university's business college dean, says Ferris is one of only 20 schools in the country that offers a degree in golf program management and one of only five that combines golf skills (one of the many admission requirements is a golf handicap of eight or lower) with business courses. The program, which also incorporates hospitality management, has a long waiting list. The tennis management program also combines some skill level with business courses but is not as popular as the golf program. That is ironic, said Nicol, because most of the students in the program graduate with three or four job offers.
The degree in music industry management does not require any musical talent, but it does call for a passion in the field, said Nicol.
Last year, Ferris established a program in information security and intelligence. The program is intended to provide instruction in information maintenance, security and interpreting information. It also injects skills having to deal with foreign language. There are courses in visual analysis and examination, organized crime, gang and terrorism issues, introduction to data mining, statistics and risk analysis.
Linking the supply chain
Elsewhere, schools have increased options for education on business supply-chain issues.
A new master of supply-chain management degree program at the University of Michigan is on the horizon for 2009. The program is going through admissions for its first set of classes in January.
Ravi Anupindi, academic programs director for the program, said the school is continuing to take enrollment applications through Aug. 1, then it will go through a selection process and notify those accepted by Oct. 1.
The one-year master's program at the Ann Arbor campus starts with a full class schedule in the winter-spring semester, followed by summer internships of up to 14 weeks through companies that take part in the UM Tauber Institute for Global Operations. Students then complete another set of fall classes to graduate, Anupindi said.
Eric Olson, the supply-chain program manager, said the new degree is the result of conversations with local business leaders about their changing needs in an era of outsourcing and extended supply chains.
“It was through some of our business and training relationships with (local) corporations that we were seeing the change,” he said. “We've been moving from more of a shop-floor relationship with business in the past to a new model as manufacturing has changed and companies need to manage supply chains. Graduates who come out with thorough specialization can move almost immediately into more of a management role.”
Wayne State University is reviewing a proposal to replace its current business logistics degree program with a degree in global supply-chain management, but it awaits a review by the school's Board of Governors. The WSU School of Business Administration crafted a proposal based on the findings of a task force convened by SBA Dean David Williams to retool the existing business logistics curriculum for an undergraduate degree and offer possible internships in that discipline.
Linda Zaddach, assistant dean for student services at the WSU business school, said the school hopes to obtain a decision over the summer, in time to implement the program in the fall. No graduate program is currently planned.
“There are a couple of course additions or changes, but it mostly it is just about making the (logistics) program more current. "Business logistics' is a little passe,” she said. “That subject (supply chains) is definitely in demand.”
Other relatively new programs at Wayne State include a doctorate degree in business administration and a doctorate in industrial engineering.
Eastern has had a graduate specialization in supply-chain management in place for several years. The school went on to add an undergraduate program in 2007 and has a class of 25 students, compared with about 75 in the graduate program.
David Mielke, dean of the EMU College of Business, said the grad program has drawn substantial enrollment from older professionals returning to school to retrain as well as more recent college graduates. The EMU specialization can be obtained as the focus of an MBA degree or separately as a certification with fewer courses and no degree awarded.
“It's probably a bimodal distribution of students,” Mielke said. “One group is probably between 28-32 years old, and the other may be in their late 40s to 50. It's a program that attracts people who already have some real-world experience and have seen the need for this.”
