By Carter A. Prescott, Management Communications Consultant

As the global business landscape shifts and changes, MBA programs are following suit. As you research programs, you'll begin to see the increasing importance of corporate partnerships and an increased emphasis on you.

Strategic alliances
To better leverage their resources, schools are joining forces to teach students and to conduct postgraduate training for corporate executives. New York University, for example, develops executive Corporate Degree Programs whose curricula are customized to companies' employees. Corporate advisory boards, long a staple of most graduate-level business programs, are increasingly relied on to provide advice on curricula as well as hiring opportunities.

Corporate partners also contribute other sorely needed resources. Purdue has one of the most extensive computing labs of any business school, thanks to the generosity of such high-tech partners as AT&T, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, and PictureTel. "The business environment is moving fast, and even elite schools don't have all the money they need to access new markets, technology, and faculty expertise," says Charles Hickman, former director of projects and services at AACSB International, which accredits MBA programs in the United States.

Customer focus
It's not uncommon to hear business school professors routinely refer to students and companies as customers — and to treat their needs with the same respect. Many schools are applying the very business principles taught in those institutions to operating the schools themselves. They're becoming more customer-focused, reducing the cycle time for admissions processing and curriculum development, and becoming more efficient in lowering tuition or in keeping it from rising quickly. Seattle University, for example, brings classes closer to customers by holding identical evening courses on two campuses that straddle either side of the river, making it easier for employees at Seattle's biggest companies to reach their classes.

With such evolution occurring day by day at business schools, more than ever before, today's reinvented advanced business programs aim to prepare you for the real world of work, where you will work in teams, take a global view, and analyze problems from a multitude of perspectives. To accomplish these goals, advanced business programs intend to equip you with the ability to embrace change, accept ambiguity, and lead others with the vision and confidence gained from continuous learning.

With a newly minted MBA degree, you are better qualified to enter new fields, better able to leverage your prior work experience, and more likely to sustain higher earnings over the course of your career. Equally important, you'll have the opportunity to make a significant difference on as broad a scale as you wish. With finely honed analytical skills, the ability to work well with people, and the desire to keep learning, today's MBA graduates can succeed in a broad range of general management positions and add more value than ever before.

This article has been adapted from Peterson's MBA Programs, available for purchase in our online bookstore.