The University of Houston-Victoria College of Business’s Strategic Master of Business Administration recently was included in one of the Princeton Review’s lists of top business programs in the nation.

The Princeton Review included the Strategic MBA program in its The Best Business Schools 2022: Best On-Campus MBA Programs list. The list includes schools from across the country and the world and is determined by using factors including institutional and student survey data.

Ken Colwell

“Inclusion in the Princeton Review is a great achievement for the UHV College of Business,” said Ken Colwell, dean of the college. “It is a clear testament of the hard work done by our dedicated faculty and staff, and we are grateful to our students for their recognition of the quality of our programs.”

The Princeton Review built its list for 2021 based on data from surveys of nearly 26,000 students enrolled in MBA programs at 375 schools, and of administrators at those schools. Several of the lists were based solely on data from student surveys, while other lists were based on data from student and administrator surveys. The student surveys for the Best On-Campus MBA Programs list was based on students who were enrolled in the schools between the 2018 and 2021 academic years.

The UHV College of Business is accredited by The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Less than 5 percent of business schools worldwide earn this mark of excellence. The Strategic MBA program at UHV is a hybrid program where students can take both in-person and online courses and can be finished in as little as one year.

Concentrations include:

• Accounting
• Entrepreneurship
• Finance
• Human Resources Management
• Management
• Marketing

Receiving recognition from the Princeton Review is the result of years of ongoing efforts to continually evaluate and improve on the business college’s programs, said Jun Yang, a UHV professor of marketing. In particular, the faculty spent a lot of time adapting their methods during the previous two years to better meet the needs of students who had to shift from in-person to online learning during the pandemic.

Jun Yang

“One of the things we heard from our students was that they appreciated the ability to have interactions with and speak to their professors instead of just watching online lectures,” Yang said. “That led us to include real-time meetings with professors in the schedule in addition to the traditional lecture videos that typical online classes use. The response was so positive that we’ve begun expanding that method into undergraduate online courses as well.”

Another tool the business faculty members use involves offering practical, experiential learning. That can include simulations where students compete in virtual economic systems or projects that partner with area businesses and organizations. For example, Yang’s Marketing classes have conducted research studies for several groups, including the Fort Bend County Libraries, the Victoria Ballet Theater and the National Association of Steel Pipe Distributors.

“Students love these real-world experiences,” Yang said. “Over the years, the faculty and the college have received emails from students expressing their appreciation for the experiences we offer them through experiential learning.”