First students graduate from online ‘green’ MBA

Publish date	2008-08-12
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Green Mountain College is celebrating its first class of graduates from the online masters degree programme in sustainable business.

The Vermont school’s MBA was the first accredited distance education programme in the US to have the concept of sustainable business at its heart. The programme emphasizes the ‘triple bottom line’ approach to business: people, planet and profit.

The class of 2008 are based in California, Colorado, New York, Wisconsin and Washington.

Green Mountain was just ahead of the curve in terms of pioneering business programmes with a core environmental ethos. Now, such ‘green’ initiatives are becoming more popular in business and education.

From global corporations such as BP spending billions on becoming more ecologically friendly to small-scale entrepreneurs striving to operate in a sustainable way, being green – and being seen to be green – is becoming increasingly important.

Reflecting this trend is an increase in environmental and sustainability issues covered by MBA programmes.

According to ‘Beyond Grey Pinstripes,’ a biennial survey by the World Resources institute and the Aspen Institute, business schools are rapidly adapting their programmes to cover green issues.

The 2008 survey found that out of 91 business schools surveyed on six continents, 54 per cent required a course in ethics, corporate social responsibility, sustainability, or business and society – up from 45 per cent in 2003 and 34 per cent in 2001. In the last two years alone, the number of schools offering an elective with a social or environmental element has increased by 50 per cent.

According to the latest study, Stanford University’s MBA is the best school for an education in sustainable business. In fact, most of the top-rated programmes are at US schools, though there are a few notable exceptions. These included Nottingham University’s MBA in Sustainable Development, which has recently been discontinued.

Elsewhere in the UK, Warwick Business School, which offers an MBA by distance learning, offers management students an elective module that focuses on environmental issues in contemporary management, and is studied at IIIEE in Lund, Sweden.

Bath University runs a part-time MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice that is taught through a combination of workshops and online learning techniques, while Liverpool University offers planning graduates a Masters in Environmental Management. Green Mountain College in the US recently launched what is believed to be the first fully online green MBA.

Very few schools offer complete management programmes that have a green consciousness at their core. One trailblazer in this area is Bainbridge Graduate Institute in Washington State in the US, which runs an MBA in Sustainable Business. The programme combines distance learning with monthly, intensive, face-to-face classroom sessions.

Jill Bamburg, Dean of the Institute’s MBA programme, maintains the key difference between BGI’s programme and others that contain green electives is that it weaves environmental and social sustainability issues into every element of the MBA core.

The school also offers a four-course sequence that focuses on issues related to sustainability, including systems thinking and social justice.

Bamburg added: “The strongest argument for entrepreneurs specifically is that sustainability is where the opportunities are. The way in which the world has been operating since the Industrial Revolution is clearly not sustainable. The whole world needs to be re-invented. For my money, this is one of the biggest entrepreneurial opportunities of all time.”

Keywords: green MBA, environment.

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