Applications No Longer Required by Online MBA Program at Northeastern University

To improve accessibility by potential students, Northeastern University’s D’Amore-McKim School of Business announced it has launched a pioneering approach to admissions for its fall 2024 courses. The business school has introduced a disruptive new option, performance-based admissions (PBA), for two graduate programs. They include the school’s online MBA degree (OMBA) and its four-month online graduate certificate in business administration (OGCBA).

The cutting-edge performance admissions approach streamlines the admissions process. It enables prospective students to demonstrate their readiness for advanced study by successfully completing a small sample of the program’s actual coursework during one to three “pathway courses.”

In exchange, potential students don’t need to submit extensive documentation like reference letters, GMAT or GRE scores, college transcripts, application essays, or resumes when they complete these classes instead. With performance admissions, there’s no application—ever.

Although a quarter of the degree programs on Coursera’s platform now offer performance admissions, to the best of our knowledge here at BSchools, D’Amore-McKim operates only the third MBA program in the United States to offer a PBA option. In collaboration with Coursera, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Gies College of Business was the first business school in the world to offer a PBA pathway into an MBA program through its performance-based admissions track into its online MBA program known as the iMBA, as we discuss further below. Then in 2023, the Stuart School of Business at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago also added a performance admissions option for its online MBA program through Coursera.

Before D’Amore-McKim’s announcement, the Northeastern University College of Engineering had announced in January 2024 that it would launch performance admissions pathways for two of its online degree programs while continuing to offer traditional admissions procedures for both of those programs. These programs were the online master of science in information systems and master of science in data analytics engineering, with Cousera offering performance admissions pathways for both the OMSIS and MSDAE.

Then, on May 9, D’Amore-McKim announced the launch of the performance admissions pathway for its two business programs in a blog post. Five days later, on May 14, Northeastern’s Assistant VP for New Ventures & Business Operations Robert Towner gave an extended interview about the university’s performance admissions implementations.

On the Office Hours with EAB podcast, Towner talked about Northeastern’s performance admissions strategy with Jennie Bailey, an executive with the Washington, DC-based higher education consulting firm EAB.

Towner is one of the most experienced university executives working in online education today. He started his career as the director of business development for online programs at Illinois Gies, where he managed business development for the iMBA, now one of the most successful innovations in graduate education. He then worked for Coursera in Mountain View, California, where he managed the firm’s degrees marketing team for North America, including Coursera’s launch of performance-based admissions pathways for several new university partners. He holds an MBA degree from Oakland University in suburban Detroit.

This interview is remarkable because Towner discusses several surprising advantages of performance admissions for graduate program applicants that—to our knowledge—no university official had ever previously discussed in the media. Moreover, no other higher education executive seems to talk so openly about the unspoken and often challenging obstacles inherent in traditional admissions that no longer cause trouble for applicants within the performance admissions paradigm. Graduate program applicants need to know about the excerpts from his remarks that we present, along with our insights and analysis below.

The Ultimate Updated Application—Without The Application

First, the performance admission benefits for applicants that Towner emphasizes differ somewhat from those advocated by Coursera and some of its university partners.

For example, as we noted in our first article on performance admissions, Coursera’s Dr. Kenton de Kirby points out that the traditional admissions process, which relies on indicators like GRE scores or transcripts, is really a collection of proxy predictors of a learner’s ability to succeed—not the actual ability to succeed in the program itself.

“Performance admissions just goes right for it, right? You are actually measuring the thing that you’re supposed to predict: the ability to succeed in the program,” says Dr. de Kirby. “And so you’re admitting students that actually are already succeeding in your program. . .It’s actually better at measuring the thing that you’re interested in.”

That’s certainly a persuasive effectiveness and efficiency argument. But by contrast, look at the compelling benefits that Towner emphasizes:

Really what [performance admissions] is about is giving the learner the opportunity to demonstrate what skills they have today and how they could be a good fit for a potential academic program without being judged on past or specific data points, whether that be GPA, years of work experience, what you did your undergrad degree in.

And we know so many people’s careers change and what their interest was when they were 18 to 25 years old when they did their bachelor’s degree versus what they might be doing as a working professional or what they need to upskill might look very differently.

So the idea of performance-based admissions, or as we’ll call it PBA, is really to provide an opportunity for learners to enroll in courses that are part of the degree program and demonstrate what they can do now in those courses, what grades they can get now in those courses, how they can be successful in those courses and matriculate into the program in that manner. (emphasis ours)

Notice how Towner instead emphasizes the temporal benefits of performance admissions. He’s arguing that a PBA application allows the candidate to focus the admission committee’s attention on demonstrations of the applicant’s current skills and capabilities right now and force the committee to disregard the potentially obsolete or irrelevant evidence of the candidate’s capabilities from years or decades ago.

Notice also that this temporal shift in focus can benefit a wide range of applicants. These might include those with poor academic records during their first attempts at college, but they also might include applicants currently working in engineering jobs despite liberal arts degrees. Under traditional admissions, many engineering master’s programs could deny admission to those applicants simply because of their choice of a non-STEM (science, technology, engineering, or mathematics) undergraduate major.

Towner offers an astute observation. We would also add that before performance admissions, never before in the history of university admissions have applicants at scale been given the power to force admissions committees to disregard such substantial amounts of historical data that could reduce their odds of admission.

Defusing the Stress of Reference Letter Requests

Coursera’s data shows that second only to the costs of entering a degree program, the main reason why qualified potential students don’t apply to degree programs is because of the application. Having to complete a lengthy and arduous application process deters millions of these students from applying to universities every year.

And in Towner’s view, that resistance isn’t only because of the time, effort and expenses required to collect and file so much extensive documentation. He says that during his career, he’s heard quite a few stories from potential graduate students about all the anxiety and stress involved with asking for reference letters from recommenders.

For example, here’s a segment where Towner talks about all the awkward embarrassment that so many MBA and other master’s degree applicants experience because of difficult conversations related to these requests:

Nobody wants to submit their letters of recommendation. . .I don’t want to go ask my boss to have to write me a letter of recommendation.

We all have only so much political capital to use at work. Do I really want to burn a favor in asking a boss or a colleague or an associate in a different division, “Hey, I really need you to write this letter for my program.”

Do I really want to do that?

And then there’s the anxiety and stress that comes along with that. Because now you have people at your workplace who know you’ve applied to a degree program. And they’re going to ask, you know. . .

“What’s going on? I wrote that letter of recommendation for you. Are you starting your MBA? Is this happening?”

And for whatever reason, maybe you weren’t admitted to that program. And now you have the embarrassment and anxiety behind having to say something like: “Thank you for writing that letter, but actually I wasn’t admitted, so I won’t be starting my MBA, or I won’t be doing these things.”

These are all things that I’ve heard from applicants for a long time that are barriers to their saying, “Hey, I’m ready to jump in and start school.” (emphasis ours)

Fortunately, under performance admissions, applicants never need to worry about obtaining reference letters for their applications because—once again—there’s no application, ever. Their pathway coursework IS the application. And that also means there’s never any anxiety or stress related to embarrassment or humiliation because of reference letter requests, as Towner describes.

Could Performance Admissions Kill Traditional Applications?

Towner points out that when Northeastern’s engineering college offered performance admissions for its first two degree programs in January 2024, the university also offered a traditional admissions process for applicants who wanted that option. He says the reason is that some corporations who pay for their employees’ master’s degrees might insist they comply with a traditional application process, and Northeastern didn’t want to turn away that business.

Towner then offered the following observation:

What we saw in our first term of launching this with engineering is over 99 percent of the students who came in chose the PBA process versus the traditional process.

That’s a highly significant observation. In other words, given a choice between traditional admissions and a performance admissions pathway, essentially 100 percent of the applicants chose performance admissions.

One could argue that’s a small sample from a single university during a single semester, which might be true. However, since December 2023, our team has been studying the introduction of performance admissions at several institutions, such as the University of Colorado at Boulder, America’s first college to introduce performance admissions in 2019. And we have yet to learn of one single case of a student offered both traditional and PBA admissions who didn’t choose the performance admissions pathway.

There are a lot of implications to Towner’s report of this nearly-100 percent preference. But the main one is that performance admissions represents a dangerous threat to testing firms like Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE, and the Graduate Management Admissions Council, which administers the GMAT. Both of these companies are currently under severe financial pressure because of the long-term decline in standardized testing, with 80 percent of American colleges and universities test-free or test-optional for the 2025 academic year.

Because there’s never an application with performance admissions, there are never any admission tests. And every student admitted to a graduate degree program through a performance admission pathway represents hundreds of dollars worth of lost income to ETS or GMAC.

NU’s Performance Admissions Branding and Advertising

Finally, under Towner’s leadership, Northeastern appears to have ramped up its marketing efforts behind performance admissions to the next level.

In 2024, the university started to brand this option as “Fast App,” meaning that any online degree program that displays this branding is really offering performance admissions. Moreover, Northeastern has also started to deploy advertising, such as commercials selling performance admissions with their degree programs on social media platforms and YouTube, like this slick and engaging example.