Not long after Dave Blackwell arrived in Tampa to take charge of the University of South Florida’s Muma College of Business in 2024, he understood he would have to make investments. USF had recently been invited to join the Association of American Universities, the selective organization of top research institutions on the continent, and the honor came with expectations. “We had to keep investing in our faculty,” he says, “to keep up our research profile to be consistent with a business school at an AAU university.” At the same time, with B-schools increasingly competing on amenities, Blackwell could see that Muma’s building in Tampa needed to be expanded and updated.
How would Muma pay for all this, or for the many small projects and opportunities that would inevitably pop up? University annual budgets are notoriously tight. “There’s not a lot of extra money that is discretionary to invest in other parts of the college,” Blackwell says. “We have to develop alternative revenue streams.”
One such stream began flowing in April, when Muma introduced a suite of programs aimed at company leaders and senior managers: financial principles for nonfinancial leaders, building high-performing teams, and artificial intelligence and the future of knowledge work. Blackwell hopes these entries will be the start of a fast-growing—and lucrative—portfolio of executive education courses, housed at Muma’s brand-new Center for Executive and Leadership Education at the school’s St. Petersburg campus. If all goes well, executive education could soon contribute $10 million a year to the school’s revenue.
For the business schools that offer it, executive education—which typically comprises short courses on narrow subjects that don’t lead to a graduate degree—can be a source of much-needed cash. Figures from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), a global accrediting body, suggest that every dollar of tuition brought in through these programs at US business schools generates about 20¢ of surplus. Muma hopes to do much better than that; the school expects a surplus of as much as $6 million (or 60¢ for every tuition dollar) from the new programs.
Revenue from these programs has rebounded sharply since the pandemic, according to AACSB data, and has surpassed pre-Covid-19 levels at four of the five schools that disclose it. At Harvard Business School, nondegree programs contribute about 22% of its revenue, according to the school’s most recent annual report. Across the country, at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, exec-ed revenue has more than doubled since 2016, according to tax forms filed with the IRS.
Unicon, a consortium of business school exec-ed programs, forecasts that money from nondegree programs for its US members will increase 26% in the next five years and 47% over the next decade. Globally, Unicon predicts that revenue will rise 37% over the next decade.
“The opportunity is available to all schools; it’s just a matter of school leadership and making the investment,” says Serguei Netessine, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who leads its innovation and global initiatives. “Lower-ranked schools can charge a bit less and target midlevel managers; Wharton can target top executives and charge more.”
One reason Blackwell is so bullish about the prospects for Muma’s initiative is that it has little competition in Florida, even as the Tampa Bay area economy has boomed in recent years. In fact, relatively few schools in the US take advantage of the opportunity—and even fewer take full advantage. Of 411 US business schools surveyed by the AACSB, just 134 offered executive education in the 2024-25 academic year; 133 offered it three years earlier. Among those that do, the dollars are small on average—only about $2 million in revenue, or 3% of a school’s new funding streams. At the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, where exec ed is highly regarded and long-established, the program generated about $17 million in revenue last year, or 2% of the total for the school.
“Executive education is underinvested in by most schools, because they don’t think of themselves as businesses,” Netessine says. Of course, they’re not businesses, and in fact the culture and rules typically found at schools often work against making the most out of exec ed. Moreover, some deans say investing in these programs is complicated by changing expectations in the corporate world. Senior leaders are more reluctant to step away from the C-suite for more than a day or two at a time. Also, says Vallabh Sambamurthy, dean of the University of Wisconsin School of Business in Madison, what was long standard training in leadership skills has morphed into something more existential and ambiguous. “There’s a greater focus on what’s the future of the world, what’s the future of business and how can we upskill our executives to be ready?”
Deans and program directors say the money isn’t the only reason to offer executive education. A little more than a decade ago, the Yale School of Management expanded its executive education offerings along with its one-year master’s and executive MBA programs. The moves were part of a bigger plan to increase the faculty and the school’s fields of expertise, as well as to create an environment with more resources, says David Bach, who ran Yale’s eMBA and specialized master’s programs at the time and is now president of the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland. “If you hire extra faculty, they have to teach something.” A larger faculty, in turn, allowed Yale to expand its prestige MBA program, Bach says.
For Sambamurthy and other deans, the added value of exec ed lies in the relationships forged with the local corporate community. Companies sponsor faculty research, engage students in projects and then hire them when they graduate, and send them back for master’s degrees. “While that money is important, that’s not our No. 1 criterion. It’s about really building corporate relationships,” Sambamurthy says.
Professors who teach in these programs “make a little extra money, because it’s beyond their normal teaching assignment,” Blackwell says. More important, he says, they take that experience back to their classrooms. Yet the faculty, particularly the tenure-track research professors Muma has been hiring, are often the main stumbling block to launching exec ed, according to Netessine and several B-school deans and exec-ed program directors. Among them is Michael Hartline, dean of Florida State University’s Herbert Wertheim College of Business in Tallahassee. “If you’re a major Research 1 university like Florida State, you need your faculty to do a lot of different things, and they just simply in a lot of cases don’t have the time,” he says. “Faculty, if they’re not in the classroom teaching, need to be doing their research.”
This was a particular problem for Florida State, which offered custom programs until the pandemic decimated the business. And because few corporations are in Tallahassee, professors often had to travel to other parts of the state, making time constraints worse. (This in itself is a relatively common problem for flagship state schools, whose campuses are often far from centers of commerce.) Plus, Hartline says, “a lot of faculty are not interested in doing this type of work. And, quite frankly, there’s some you probably would not want to put in front of a corporate audience.”
“Teaching executives is very different than teaching undergrad and even graduate students,” says Jon Kaupla, who left his job running the Wisconsin School of Business’s exec-ed program to start USF’s. “Executives, I would say, demand—I don’t think I’m exaggerating that—a much more interactive, engaging, sometimes I would even go as far as entertaining experience,” he says. “They don’t do well sitting for long periods of time listening—it’s just not what they do day in and day out. So you can’t expect them to come to a classroom and have that experience.”
Kaupla’s solution is to rely more on adjunct and teaching professors or lecturers, many of whom come from the business world and are comfortable planning “shorter lectures and much more interactive-type activities. The people in the programs love to talk to each other as much as they like to talk to the professors.” He’ll reserve tenured professors for a keynote or some other “shorter opportunity for them to share their research.”
Blackwell was able to launch the Center for Executive and Leadership Education because he had something else that eludes many schools—a $3 million seed fund supplied by two leading donors, Tampa Bay area entrepreneurs Kate Tiedemann and Ellen Cotton. He retained Kaupla in the fall of 2024 to conduct a feasibility study on exec ed. That led to a business plan and then an advisory council of executives from 25 area businesses. Those executives helped him determine the initial offerings.
One member of the advisory council, C.J. Mintrone, an executive vice president at PNC Bank who manages corporate banking across much of central Florida, says that among midsize private companies in the region, “everybody’s looking for education in some form or fashion,” with an eye toward succession. For these companies, “you can get a lot more hands-on with USF than you otherwise would.”
For USF, the open classes will, Kaupla hopes, serve as a gateway to the more lucrative work of tailoring custom programs for individual companies. Corporate spending on training, including programs like these, totaled $403 billion in 2025, including almost $190 billion just in the US, according to the online trade publication Training Industry. “We always start with understanding very targeted needs,” he says. “We have a database of curriculum and content that we can then pull from and piece together based on that custom need. We’re not developing everything from scratch.” Kaupla aims to generate about 70% of the center’s revenue, and more of its profit, from custom programs.
Marketing these programs, Kaupla says, is fundamentally business-to-business sales work, which gives rise to another obstacle. While the business world typically rewards sales success, at “public universities in particular,” he says, “it’s going to be very challenging to set up an infrastructure where incentives and commissions are going to be easily paid, because they’re all about fairness.”
Wisconsin, where Kaupla managed the exec-ed program until last June, is one of a few US schools that have set up a separate nonprofit to run the exec program. “We were able to do very creative incentives and comp plans,” Kaupla says. They came at a cost, though, because the program had to hire its own administrative employees rather than piggyback off the B-school. In the years since the pandemic, Wisconsin’s executive-ed courses have generated little if any surplus, according to returns filed with the IRS. The Kelley School of Business at Indiana University has a similar arrangement for managing exec ed and has likewise delivered only modest profits. Kaupla hopes to modify the model, outsourcing just compensation and legal work to an independent nonprofit.
On the other hand, Berkeley Haas also delivers executive education through a nonprofit, and not only has exec-ed revenue increased in the past eight years, but profit—along with the margin—has risen sharply. In fiscal year 2024, the latest year for which data is available, the UC Berkeley Center for Executive Education remitted $9 million to Haas and $3.6 million to the university on $40 million in revenue.
Berkeley, of course, has advantages other schools lack, including a reputation as one of the best B-schools in the world. Still, notwithstanding all the other benefits of executive education programs, Berkeley has been resolutely focused on expansion and financial performance.
The transformation began a decade ago. With the program in a slump, the school’s dean at the time brought in a management professor to assess the center’s culture. That professor, Jenny Chatman, the current dean of Haas, concluded it was “slow and overly collaborative.” “I see this often,” Chatman says. “It is nuanced but incredibly important, because while collaboration is beneficial, too much of it can bog an organization down and act as a cover for individual accountability.”
“She had to explain it to me twice,” says Mike Rielly, who’d just been brought over from the school’s executive MBA program to manage executive education. It meant that “the entire organization did not understand that, at the end of the day, we are an impact and associated revenue—i.e., sales—organization, and that was a culture shift.”
Almost immediately, the center chose to focus on 10 markets, five in the US and five abroad. Spending on advertising more than doubled within a few years, and overall spending overseas, especially in the Middle East and Japan, almost quadrupled. (The travel budget similarly exploded.)
At the same time, the school revamped its offerings to reach deeper into what it considers, as Rielly puts it, Haas’ four “academic pillars”—strategy, leadership, finance and entrepreneurship. Despite the conventional wisdom, the school recruited extensively from tenured professor ranks for instructors. “Though I wouldn’t say that what’s required in the MBA classroom is exactly the same as what’s required in the executive education classroom, I think it’s teachable,” Chatman says. “We often have to do some additional coaching or start them off with a small module, and then grow from there.” The center also employs staff to help faculty design programs.
Chatman herself made the leap years ago, when she first came to Berkeley: “I did a lot of prep for the first time, and for that hour-and-a-half segment, it probably took me doing it four times to really optimize for this audience and really understand what they were looking for.” Even as dean, she says, “I do a little bit, because I miss it and I love it.”
It helps that exec-ed instructors at Berkeley are generously compensated. In 2023 a Haas marketing professor earned around $400,000 teaching businesspeople at the center—more than his regular salary. A design professor at Haas collected nearly $500,000. According to the center’s IRS return, 36 other contractors earned at least $100,000 that year; most are instructors.
Growth allowed the Berkeley center to become more efficient—staff compensation has increased at a much slower pace than revenue, and other expenses have held steady. The center has also restructured to make itself leaner and reduced office operating expenses dramatically. And, Rielly says, “we have even more ambitious revenue and margin goals,” though he declines to identify them.
Berkeley’s laser focus on the bottom line doesn’t resonate at every B-school. At Wisconsin, Sambamurthy aims to refocus executive education as one part of a broader relationship with the state’s leading businesses. He also hopes the program can be more responsive to those companies’ needs, even if they can’t always articulate them. Under new leaders, he says, the program will work with client businesses to “engage in the solution discovery, rather than selling a fixed product.”
Nonetheless, Sambamurthy is taking one page from the Berkeley playbook: He says he will anchor the curricula more closely to the school’s areas of expertise, particularly AI. He also plans to make the courses “stackable,” meaning students would earn credit that could be applied to an MBA, an approach becoming more common at European business schools, including IMD. And Sambamurthy isn’t averse to making money; he’s hoping to increase revenue to $10 million within the next year and a half. (Revenue stood at $7.7 million in 2025.)
For his part, Blackwell wants to divert Florida executives heading to the Northeast, starting in the Tampa Bay area, then expanding to nearby Orlando, and then Jacksonville and the Miami-West Palm Beach corridor. “We have faculty members that we can put in front of executives that have the same level of accomplishment in their profession as faculty members at Harvard or Wharton,” he says. “Maybe not top to bottom, but certainly enough that we can deliver a quality product in this market.”