John Ferrie had no idea he was about to be named chief executive officer of the country’s top cheese manufacturer when he walked into his Northwestern University business law class recently. He was immediately consumed with a crisis: His cheese was making Americans sick by the truckload.
Luckily for Ferrie and his classmates, who assumed roles as lawyers, public relations experts and company board members, it was a mock scenario. The eight students in Pete Wentz’s ethics class had to decide how to handle the problem of a factory worker with bad hygiene who had contaminated the company’s cheese.
The role-playing exercise was just one aspect of the newly revamped law and MBA program at NU. Joint-degree programs, in which students work toward two graduate degrees simultaneously, have been around for decades, but recently universities have started promoting them to attract students.
Last year, for example, NU cut its JD/MBA program to three years from four. Applications doubled.
“We wanted to make it an accessible degree,” said David Van Zandt, dean of the law school.
Still, just 10 percent of the incoming law and business graduate students are enrolled in the joint program. Enrollment hasn’t increased substantially over the last several years.
Marketing tool
“What’s changed quite a bit is that 10 years ago, there was very little promotion of the joint degree,” said William Brodsky, chairman and CEO of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Brodsky is on the board of NU’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management.
Graduate school enrollment in general has been slowly declining since 1996, based on figures released by the Council of Graduate Schools in Washington. The non-profit group has been surveying graduate schools since 1986.
That decline may change, however, as the economy weakens.
The number of people taking the Law School Admissions Test in June jumped 18.6 percent from last year, according to the Law School Admission Council. The Great Lakes region, which includes Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin, saw an 11 percent increase in law school applications, while the Midwest region of Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota saw an 18 percent increase. Washington University School of Law in St. Louis saw a jump of more than 30 percent in its applications from 2000 to 2001.
And the Graduate Management Admission Council reported a 12 percent increase this year in the number of people taking its GMAT, a test for graduate admissions.
Students seek bargains
Students look for programs where they can get the most for their money, said Michael Nettles, a professor of education at the University of Michigan who studies graduate school enrollment.
“The dual-degree programs help universities by making them competitive and attractive to students with multiple interests,” Nettles said.
Students in master’s programs tend to see tuition as a short-term investment with guaranteed results, which makes them willing to pay top dollar, Nettles said.
“In many cases, a master’s takes only a year or two, and it comes with a significant increase in salary,” he said. The costs are significant. NU charges $104,334, or $34,778 a year, for its JD/MBA. A law degree by itself would cost just more than $90,000, while the two-year MBA would cost about $78,700. At the University of Chicago, the combined degree costs $120,332: $77,632 for the law school portion and $42,700 for the business portion.
“About the only disadvantage to a joint degree is the extra time and extra money it takes to get one,” Brodsky said.
Frank Fehrenbach, 28, decided on a dual degree to merge two areas of interest: business and law. Fehrenbach, who left a consulting job in London for Chicago, is enrolled in NU’s JD/MBA program.
“The law is becoming so critical in today’s economy, no matter what you’re doing,” he said. “It made sense to have both degrees.”
A number of schools also allow students to combine undergraduate and graduate studies. These students earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees, usually in about five years. Washington University offers a joint bachelor’s degree in engineering and MBA, which can be completed in 3 1/2 years.
3 years instead of 4
Washington University also offers a joint social work and business master’s program. Students receive master’s degrees in social work and business administration in three years; completing the degrees separately would take four. The program, which is about 10 years old, has seen its enrollment grow slowly. Ten students are in the program now.
The degree appeals to students who are interested in social work administration and those looking for human resource jobs in large corporations, said Lisa Morris, assistant professor at the university’s George Warren Brown School of Social Work.
“This degree makes social work administrators more marketable and better prepared,” she said. “In public welfare, with all the privatization and downsizing, management is having to be more and more cost effective and efficient.”
Morris said the dual degree helps students “handle both the corporate, for-profit world as well as the social justice, meeting-the-needs-of-people side.”
Cross training
Dual graduate degrees are the ultimate in cross training, educators said. “The cross-training aspect is what makes these [graduates] desirable,” Van Zandt said.
The U. of C. offers six dual degrees in its Graduate School of Business alone. Students may combine business with disciplines including medicine, public policy or international relations.
For students, the draw is two advanced degrees in a relatively short time. Most joint degree programs entice students by cutting the time normally required to earn the degrees. At the U. of C., students graduate with an MBA and law degree in four years–one year earlier than if they earned each degree separately. That cuts down on time and tuition.
“The biggest thing for me was that it’s a great program in both aspects,” said Ferrie, now in his second year of the Northwestern program. “I didn’t have to sacrifice quality in order to get both degrees in just three years.”
Amy Gresh, 25, a fourth-year graduate student at the U. of C., started out in the law school. When she decided to pursue a career in corporate law, she looked into adding an MBA to her resume. That upped her time commitment to four years from three.
“All the lawyers I talked to said, `Yeah, do it,'” she said. “So far, the only real disadvantage is that I’m paying private school tuition for an additional year.”
Ready for the unexpected
Brodsky said a joint degree is a good idea for any number of reasons, including “you never know.”
“I’m a lawyer by training, but spent the bulk of my career in a non-law setting,” he said. “You can’t know where you’re going to end up. You never know what you’re going to need.”
In the workforce, Brodsky said, a joint degree is an asset.
“Most people don’t know how long it takes or what the requirements are for these degrees, and they don’t care,” he said. “What’s important is that you have two degrees from a top-flight school.”
Jean Dowdall, vice president for A.T. Kearney Executive Search in Alexandria, Va., didn’t entirely agree with Brodsky’s view. Dual degrees aren’t necessarily something employers value, she said.
Job “candidates with a dual degree do not automatically rise to the top,” she said. “They might be a strong or weak candidate for other reasons.”
But given a choice between two candidates who are equal in all other areas, Dowdall said, employers are more likely to choose the person with two degrees.
“Someone with two degrees doubles their options,” she said. “They have an affinity for two different areas of expertise.”
Efficiency a by-product
Nettles said the joint programs often force faculty to be more efficient when designing curricula.
“They have to concentrate on what the students really need in education and training to succeed in the workforce,” Nettles said.
Students enrolled in joint programs usually receive no special treatment. Most universities require that students submit applications and be accepted to both schools. Students also are on their own as far as selecting enough courses in both disciplines to ensure they have the required credits for graduation.
“For a long time, students choosing to get two degrees were fighting a whole bureaucracy,” Brodsky said. “Students could get two degrees if they could survive it.”
Northwestern decided in 1995 to thoroughly integrate its joint degree program. Students submit a single application for the JD/MBA and have a single tuition bill. Those who enroll spend the first year in the law school and the second in the business school. The third year and summers are a mixture of the two schools. Brodsky said the new, shorter program “is really nurtured by the university. It’s dynamic.”
For Jim Sharkey, 28, the hand-in-hand relationship between the law and business schools was key to his decision to attend Northwestern. “At most schools, it’s a joint degree, but you still have to deal with each department,” he said. “Because it’s so integrated here, it reassured me that the school was really behind the program.”
Students carry heavy load
Universities don’t substantially cut the number of credit hours required for graduation. At the U. of C., JD/MBA students must take 14 business classes and 31 law courses, in addition to completing a business leadership program and 14 other elective courses. That means students take about 180 hours of class work over four years, or about 22 hours a semester. The school has graduated 83 joint JD/MBA candidates since 1986.
“The percentage of students taking a dual degree is small, and they tend to carry a heavy load,” said Barry Currier, deputy consultant for legal education at the American Bar Association. “Most students have to be pretty motivated.”
In addition to their regular course work, students in most joint degree programs also are required to complete at least one internship in both disciplines.
Pearl O’Rourke, 27, a second-year student at Northwestern, left a job as a consultant to go back to school. She would like to find a job in the public policy arena when she graduates.
“It’s turned out to be more of a time commitment than I anticipated,” O’Rourke said. “Because of the shortened time period, you’re working from the moment you get here.”
Nettles said not everyone who gets a dual degree needs one.
“It depends on what you plan to do with it,” he said. “For someone planning to be on a university faculty, specialization has its advantages. For people in industry or government, a dual degree can be an advantage. It allows them to traverse more than one world.”
High-powered careers
That holds true for JD/MBA graduates at the U. of C. Of the 13 students who have graduated with the joint degree since 1999, eight went into investment banking, two into management consulting, two into law firms and one joined a legal dot-com.
A decade ago, students with two degrees fought against a perception in the workforce that they were either over- or under-qualified. But that has changed, Brodsky said.
“Certainly it was much harder,” he said. “Law firms wanted lawyers. Banks wanted MBAs. But people have started realizing they’re really getting two for one.”
