MMPA (Canada) Program Review

[MBAReviewer]

Enrolling in a Masters in Business program is a considerable investment running around $80,000.   There were prior posts requesting for reviews of the MMPA program (Masters in Management and Professional Accounting) at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus.  Overall, the teaching quality of the MMPA program is very high.  A review of a few professors in the program:

The teaching overall is quite good.  However, the excellence of teaching is offset by the high costs for a degree that is essentially a compressed undergraduate degree dressed up as a pseudo-masters program.  Save your money and go elsewhere, like UTSC or Waterloo. 

   

My major concern is with the MMPA program itself.   It's director, Professor Brooks, was critical of students who did not attend student social functions irrespective of those who attended career focused social functions only.  Does it make sense for a educational institution to place so much emphasis on socialization or to penalize those who wish to excel in academics?  Yes and no.  While the many CEO's who succeed have excellent social skills, yet how many leaders had the financial knowledge to read between the lines prior to the 2008 financial crisis to understand that the underlying derivatives most businesses were investing in were a sham?  Social skills did not save their incompetency.  Perhaps people like Prof Brook's emphasis on promoting those individuals with good  social cognition has led to  the creation of so many CEO's who have made poor decisions on behalf of their company.

             I would not recommend the MMPA program to students.  The program fees are unreasonably high and the management seems to do little to reign in expenses such as serving multiple free lunches or having catered food.  The awards ceremony used to be at the Four Seasons, for example.  I would personally have preferred lower cost events for more reasonable student fees.  Furthermore, the department tends to be administration heavy which further drives up the cost.  For a program that has less than 200 students, there are multiple administration workers.  Streamlined organizations tend to be more flexible and the managers have better control.  The same high quality of teaching at a more reasonable cost may be obtained from other universities such as UTSC or Waterloo that have also excellent coop programs.