Student review [#47945] for MBA
at Alliance Manchester Business School

You can do a lot of things right, but if the core of your program is not strong, auxiliary benefits will not matter.

The largest issues are the structure and content of the program. “Learning by doing” is driven by their 3 main, consultancy projects. The problem is that the program takes away class time and allocates group work time for these projects in its stead. Understanding that my opinion does not include experience from other programs, you will miss out on fundamental business concepts and important learnings because of this structure. The number of operations and marketing classes are laughable (roughly 3 sessions each with professors) due to these consultancy projects. It feels as if you pay money to work on medium or easy difficulty projects while missing out on academics that you will be expected to know once you get out into industry. Furthermore, the classes that you do have regularly are boiled down to a theoretical, almost artistic decision-making class, and a class that spends its time talking about the negatives of shareholder primacy and financialization while mentioning the common, starry-eyed stakeholder solution which is not practically explored. This program lives and breathes ESG, so much so that you miss out on even more academics. Management accounting, a wildly important topic, was reduced to only 4 class sessions. Cost accounting actually spent sessions talking about how to look good on virtual meetings and how to write essays. This just is not acceptable for me. Strategy and corporate finance have been a breath of fresh air, but the rest of the offering has largely lacked substance.

You get your MBA only once – it is not practical to transfer schools like you could have in your undergraduate programs. Look for a program that spends time teaching you the fundamentals. I encourage you to really think twice about committing to this program.