Ask college students of any age what they don’t like about the logistics associated with attending school, and you’ll likely hear complaints about having to take time—often from work—to register, get books, and find out about scholarships and financial aid. Plus, they know they might not be able to get the courses they need when they need them, thereby delaying their graduation.
Ask Donald Roomes, director, BBA+ program, what, if anything, the College of Business Administration offers to address these understandable concerns and you get a simple answer: value-added programs.
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In the college’s BBA+ program, now in its fourteenth year, staff members handle time-consuming details, courses occur at convenient times and are available in the sequence students need them, and some of the programs accelerate the time to graduation. . . all for a slight increase in tuition.
“Students can focus on their course work and on doing well in the program,” Roomes said.
BBA+ program streamlines degree acquisition for working professionals.
 Thirty new BBA+ program graduates, joined by family, friends, faculty, and staff, celebrated at a party on June 27, 2008 in the Graham Center. |
The popularity of the BBA+ program offerings—BBA+ Weekend, taught on Saturdays since 1994, and BBA+ Sunrise, launched in 2004 at the Pines Center, and offered partially in the classroom weekday mornings and partially online—continues to grow.
“The first two BBA+ Sunrise groups drew between ten and twenty students, but we have 25 in the current one,” Roomes said. “While our largest BBA+ groups occur at the University Park campus, this past summer we graduated a group of thirty students from the Pines Center—our largest ever at this location.”
Surprisingly, tough economic times appear to be increasing enrollments in the value-added programs, despite their somewhat higher cost.
“Time and time again, I’ve seen that when the economy is bad, people retool,” Roomes said. “In addition, we have increased our investment in marketing, which is paying off.”
According to him, “The best selling method for the BBA+ program is referrals by our graduates, whose success helps us showcase the benefits of the program by word-of-mouth.”
To read student testimonials, and to learn more about the BBA+ program, including a new fully online version slated for the spring, 2009, semester, visit http://business.fiu.edu/landon/bba_plus_weekend.cfm.
