Kelley Direct KD Online student Sue Chung, a practicing rheumatologist, was named chief medical officer of a major clinical health network in Southern California shortly after completing her MBA in May 2025.
For years, conventional thinking held that online MBAs were for working professionals, those looking to rise in their current industries and companies. Full-time MBAs, with their built in career centers, summer internships and recruiting, were for the career pivoters.
That’s no longer a hard and fast rule. A tighter job market, rising tuition, and the opportunity cost of stepping away from work have pushed students to look harder at the return on their MBA investment. And online MBAs can help professionals make a career change without sacrificing their current paychecks.
For the past several years, we’ve asked recent online MBA graduates from top programs if they changed employers as a result of the degree as part of our annual ranking of online MBA programs. A quarter of 2025 graduates answered in the affirmative.
Another 15.6% reported changing industries, and 37.6% reported changing job functions.
ONE IN FOUR OMBAs CHANGE EMPLOYERS
For our 2026 OMBA ranking, we surveyed alumni from the Class of 2025, those graduating between July 1, 2024 and June 30, 2025. Surveys were sent to 7,957 eligible alumni at 61 ranked programs, with 1,325 responses returned. That’s a 16.7% response rate.
Though career changers and industry pivoters don’t factor into our OMBA ranking methodology, it does signal market value. Not only are schools pouring more resources into career support for OMBA students, but the pandemic and shift to more virtual learning platforms has legitimized the online education space.
This year, three of the ranked programs had half or more of responding alumni report that they changed employers either during or shortly after graduation.
American University Kogod School of Business (ranked No. 41 overall) had the highest percentage of employer switchers at 80%. Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business and Seattle University Albers School of Business both had more than have of responding graduates report changing employers. Nine other programs had 40% or higher.
Click through to see how many alumni at each school were able to make changes in:
INDUSTRIES
JOB FUNCTIONS
CAREERS
You can also see how 2025 alumni rated their overall programs in this story, and how they rated the degree’s career impact here.
Next page: Industry Changers