The Georgetown University McDonough School of Business’ (MSB) online Master of Science in Finance (MSF) program, a 21-month program in finance management offered in both part- and full-time formats, was ranked among the best online master’s degrees in finance.
The MSF program rose to the second place spot for the “Best Online Master’s in Finance Management Programs 2021” ranking by College Consensus, a company that publishes overall rankings based on a combined average from college ranking publishers and student review scores. The program improved from its sixth place ranking in 2020 .
While the MSB is proud of the ranking, student success is a priority, according to Paul Almeida, dean of the MSB.
“We focus on our students, including their learning and career success, rather than on rankings,” Almeida wrote in an email to The Hoya. “Nevertheless, we are glad that the quality of our MSF program is recognized through the #2 ranking.”
The success and career achievements of students is at the core of the program’s values, according to David Allen Ammerman, director of Academic Operations of the MSF program.
“We try to do what’s going to be right for our students,” Ammerman said in a phone interview with The Hoya. “We think a great deal about their career goals and career prospects and what that means in terms of the experiences they need, both academic and nonacademic. We think about how we can structure courses and deliver them in a way that’s going to be most beneficial for them, especially considering many of our students work full-time jobs, have families and they’re trying to go to school.”
Having the best quality instruction is central to the MSF’s mission, according to Allan Eberhart, senior associate dean of the MSF Program.
“When we were first thinking about this, we wanted this to be a high-quality program,” Eberhart said in a phone interview with The Hoya. “That meant, again, getting many of our best faculty to agree to teach in the program and having admission standards that were at least as good as our flagship MBA program. That was our mission from the very beginning: to focus on quality, quality, quality. We made a lot of decisions that were counter to ‘best practices’ at the time, and I think we’ve been validated in that mission. And so that’s why I think the good rankings measure that quality.”
The growth of the program is due in part to an influx of interest from recent graduates, according to Eberhart.
“We’re seeing a lot of growth in students that are coming right out of undergrad,” Eberhart said. “Our average age is people in their late twenties, but we have probably approximately 25% of the program now.”
At the beginning of this year, 324 students were enrolled in the MSF program, compared to only 39 students enrolled in the program when it launched in 2014, according to Eberhart.
While the program is completely online, its cohort-based structure creates a unified class similar to in-person instruction, according to Eberhart.
“We were the first, to my knowledge, technology-intensive program that limited the number of starts to one start per year,” Eberhart said. “We made this an on-campus-like program. That’s important because it’s consistent with the cohort model. That’s a big part of our program: it allows, again, our best faculty to teach in the program. If you spread out the number of starts, you can’t attract good faculty because faculty want to concentrate their teaching over multiple sections of the same course.”
Student experiences guide the program more than anything else, according to Ammerman.
“We have just a wide range of backgrounds represented in our student body, and so the thing we are always thinking about is what’s going to be best for our students,” Ammerman said. “We really let that guide us. If it results in good rankings so much the better, but we don’t really do it for the rankings.”
