A recent piece in The Wall Street Journal caught our attention. The headline read: “There is a fire sale on M.B.A.s.” It’s just one in a series of articles – including Forbes and Moneywise – all reporting the same trend.

The articles raise real questions that every business school should be sitting with right now. Demand for traditional MBA programs is softening, and the cost of graduate business education has become genuinely difficult to justify for many working professionals.

We share what follows, not to be contrarian, but because we think there's something in our iMBA story® that might actually be useful to the broader conversation.

Mission-priced. Not market-priced

When we launched our fully online MBA – known as the iMBA – in 2016, it wasn't born out of a market downturn or an enrollment crisis. It was born out of a question: What would a genuinely great MBA look like if we built it to be accessible from the very beginning?

At the time, that felt like a radical framing. Most of the conversation around graduate business education assumed that quality and affordability were in tension – that you couldn't have both. We knew that wasn’t true.

So we tried something different. We built the iMBA from the ground up with the online learners in mind, brought our top faculty online, and priced the program based on our mission – not the market. The iMBA launched at roughly $22,000 total. Today it's approximately $27,000 – still a fraction of what comparable programs cost – and that's not a discounted price. Not a price after coupon. That's just the price.

Affordability as a north star

Recent news describes schools offering discounts of 38% to 50% off MBA tuition – moves driven largely by softening demand and competitive pressure. There’s also a new layer to the equation: a new $100,000 cap on federal student loan borrowing and the elimination of Graduate PLUS loans for new borrowers entirely. These lending shifts add urgency to the conversation — programs priced above $100,000 now face a structural financing challenge that programs like the iMBA simply don't.

But there's a meaningful difference between lowering a price and building a price around access from the start. When affordability is baked into the mission, it doesn't feel like a concession. It feels like the point.

The new federal loan cap actually clarifies something we've believed all along: a degree that requires students to borrow close to the legal maximum isn't really accessible. The iMBA, at just over $27,000 total, sits well below the $100,000 federal aggregate limit – which means most students never need to borrow anywhere near that amount to begin with.

And many don't borrow at all.

A significant portion of our students use employer tuition benefits to fund their degree entirely or substantially. Spread across two to three years, employer benefits can cover a meaningful share – or the entirety – of the iMBA's cost. That's a very different conversation than the one happening at programs where students are staring down six-figure debt before they've taken a single class.

Our university was founded on a commitment to bring the highest-quality education to the people of Illinois and the world, regardless of background or economic circumstance. The iMBA is one way we live that out. It's why we've committed to keeping costs low even as the program has grown and even as we build in coursework on AI and data analytics. And it’s why, when demand for other MBA programs has softened, we haven't faced the same reckoning. Learners who couldn’t justify the lack of ROI on a six-figure MBA have found their way to us. That was always the intent.

What the numbers have told us

Since the iMBA launched in 2016 with 114 students, it’s now served more than 11,000. More than 4,600 learners are currently enrolled from all 50 states and 76 countries. Student satisfaction has held consistently above 95%. About 65% of alumni received a promotion, job offer, or accepted a new position while still in the program – not after graduation, during the program. The average pay increase during and immediately following the program has been around 25%.

We share these numbers, not as boasts, but as proof that when you build a program around quality and the learner’s return, the demand take’s care of itself.

Why any of this matters

The broader conversation these articles are prompting — about pricing, value, and who graduate business education is really for — is one we welcome. These are questions every business school should be sitting with.

At a moment when AI is reshaping business, the professionals who need to upskill most urgently are often those who can least afford a six-figure degree. That's who the iMBA was built for — and it’s why AI and analytics coursework have been integrated into the degree, at no additional cost.

It's also why we are launching the MSBAi this fall — a fully online, AI-native Master's in Business Analytics that embeds AI across every course rather than treating it as an add-on. At $32,000, it is priced on the same mission as the iMBA: give working professionals access to a rigorous, career-transforming degree without the debt load that makes the math not work.

What we hope is that affordability becomes a permanent feature of more programs, not a temporary response to enrollment pressure. The professionals navigating this moment don't need a discounted credential. They need an affordable degree built specifically for the work that is actually ahead.

AUTHOR

Nerissa Brown, Executive Associate Dean of Academic Programs, H.T. Scovill Professor of Accountancy, Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign