Big Bucks

The programs' tuition costs vary depending on their length, but reach a high with the current $22,500 price tag for the PMD and AMP programs. The participant's sponsor company must agree to pay this fee--which covers room, board and tuition for the length of the program--in addition to paying the executive's salary during the time. The program brings in about a fifth of the school's total income and helps keep it on good terms with major corporations, which provide the bulk of the material used for the 650 case studies used in teaching each year.

Nevertheless, the tuition costs are not a major factor for the large corporations, says George Wiltsey, administrative director of external relations at the school. He says that "the big cost" for the company of enrolling an executive in the program is the executive's absence from the company for a three to four month period. The Owner/President Program actually divides its nine weeks into three separate three week sections so as not to disable the participant's companies for a long period of time during their absence.

The executives must also adjust to being away from their companies and families. Joseph G. Tangney, a participant in the fall 1982 AMP program and currently Vice President and General Claims Manager for Liberty Mutual Insurance Company of Boston, explains that, for most executives, "the first couple of weeks were sort of a withdrawal," from the job and from the process of being involved in the daily decisions of one's company. The last few weeks, he adds, found many executives anxious to get back to their jobs. Only in the middle weeks of the program did most of the executives really relax, Tangney says. For most executives, he adds, "being away from the family is a difficult thing and most people were anxious to get home."

"There's a camaraderie that develops somewhat like the army, but it's a positive experience," says Tangney, explaining that the participants develop "a pretty close core--especially among members of the can groups because they live together." For Tangney, both "the rigor of the content and the relationship of the people to each other" made the program special. Despite the rigor, the AMP was still fun because it created a setting where "people with real world experience were getting back into an academic setting," able to study how the business world should ideally work and compare it with knowledge of how the business world actually works,he says. By teaching him "more effective interpersonal techniques" the program has made Perry a better corporate officer, he says.

Since 1974 these types of programs have become increasingly popular. "The interest in executive education in business is increasing not only in this country, but in Europe too," says Wiltsey. "An increasing number of companies are finding that this is a very useful thing to do."

However, the enrollment in the AMP has not changed from its standard 400 in many years, making the demand for executive education programs outweigh the supply. Despite the increasing interest, Wiltsey says that the school manages to limit the number of applicants to any specific session. "We in various subtle ways manage the pool of applicants," he says. "The worst thing that could happen to us is to have the same kind of chaos in the application process as Harvard College," he says, because the school is dealing with companies who might not send executives to them again if their qualified candidates get turned down.

Paul E. Perry, who attended AMP 1982 and is currently managing partner of the San Antonio branch of the accounting firm of Arthur Young and Co., says that his firm annually chooses one employee from one of its nationwide branches to attend the program.

Faculty Attention

Addressing concerns that the executive programs are of secondary importance to the B-School's MBA program, Wiltsey explains that the executive education programs now have all their own facilities and professors. "The executive education programs are just as much a part of the Harvard Business School as the MBA program," says Wiltsey. "We have our own basic executive education space here."

The executive education programs also receive individual attention from faculty. Each executive education program, along with the MBA program, draws its faculty from the pool of faculty at the Harvard Business School, Wiltsey says. But a faculty member concentrates exclusively on one program at a time. "Each program has a group of faculty assigned to that program for the year or usually for two or three years. At every given point in time, there is a group of faculty whose assignment is teaching in a particular program," he says.

The programs make use of a broad range of international companies and usually have about 35 percent foreign enrollment in the AMP and the PMD, says Hokanson. In the most recent PMD, the figure reached 45 percent, he says. In the International Senior Managers Program the foreign participant rate rises significantly to 80 percent, Hokanson says.

Having a large foreign contingent leads to "a lot of diverse points of view," says Tangney. For example, Perry says that his study of "corporate ethics took on a totally different perspective" when he discussed the isssues with classmates from South Africa.

One minority that still has not infiltrated the ranks of the executive education programs is women. In the most recent PMD, which graduated right before Thanksgiving, the female contingent ranked at about 10 percent of the enrollment, Hokanson says. He says this figure is gradually increasing as more women enter the corporate world.

Case Study