New WGU MS in Management and Leadership

[sanantone]

I disagree. I think the MBA is a MS lite. Here is why. Lets say you want to teach business courses at a community college. At a minimum you need to have a masters in the area (MBA works) but also six graduate courses in a specialization such as research methods, marketing, management, finance etc. A MBA will never give you that. To me, the MBA is almost like a liberal arts general studies degree for business. You get a sampling of courses but never get beyond "intro" level in anything. The MBA was initially designed for professionals with bachelors degrees in engineering, etc. to get a bit of a business education so that they know what they are doing when moving into upper management. It was not designed to produce scholars or specialists.

So if you really want to learn economics, get a MS in economics, not a MBA.

The MBA is a professional degree. Law is a professional degree. I don't think that being professional vs research-oriented automatically makes a degree "lite." The degree being discussed here is not an MS in Economics; it doesn't even have a research methods course. The MBA is an interdisciplinary degree, but that doesn't equate to trying to be the light version of any one thing because it intentionally includes a little bit of everything. It's like getting a degree in social science. You can't say that a social science degree is sociology-lite, psychology-lite, political science-lite, or anthropology-lite. It's not trying to be just one of those things. The same could be said about a natural science degree. It's not biology-lite, chemistry-lite, or physics-lite. It's simply just interdisciplinary.

I know I've called criminal justice sociology-lite even though it's supposed to be interdisciplinary, but criminal justice's history really is rooted in sociology. IIRC, a study that looked at 30-something criminal justice programs found that a plurality of the professors had sociology degrees. Criminal justice is really just an applied version of criminology; and, criminology is really just a sub-field of sociology.

I think the whole 18 credit hour thing has been exaggerated for lack of a better term. I can guarantee you that most of my CJ professors with sociology degrees do not have any credits in CJ. 18 credit hours is more of a requirement when you don't have a whole degree that's in the field or a related field. There are MBA programs with 18-credit concentrations, however.
http://www.business.rutgers.edu/mba/conc...curriculum

Actually, these aren't hard to find.
http://online.saintleo.edu/academics/mas...nting.aspx