GM Offers Employees Access to Online MBA

The classes will be tied to Cardean University, a wholly owned subsidiary of UNext, which is accredited and authorized to grant degrees.

Last December Intel announced a similar MBA program for its employees in conjunction with Babson College ( Ultimate Benefit from Intel ? An MBA ).

Online and Onsite

Beginning in the fall, GM expects to enroll about 400 employees in a full range of courses for an e-MBA, while 200 additional staff members will take non-credit courses in fields such as accounting methods and online marketing.  The courses will be available to the firm’s 88,000 salaried workers.

Participating employees will log into online classrooms through a link on the General Motors University Web site, where business courses developed in conjunction with schools at Columbia University, Stanford University, the University of Chicago, and the London School of Economics and Political Science, will be offered.

The program is expected to cut $4 million per year in travel and tuition costs from the automaker’s annual budget for management education, which provided tuition for 4,000 GM managers in North America.

The program comes at a time when the online learning industry is expected to grow from $6.3 billion in 2001 to more than $23 billion in 2004, according to International Data Corporation.