Stephen Skripak likes to tell prospective students at Virginia Tech about how he earned his MBA at Purdue University in the late 1980s while working as a young executive at General Electric. He was promoted twice in the three years it took him to obtain the part-time degree.

“I decided to go that direction because I was already married, we already had a house and my wife’s income wouldn’t have been enough to sustain our lifestyle,” says Prof Skripak, assistant dean of graduate programmes at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin School of Business. “It fitted my circumstances perfectly — and my circumstances are not that different from people today: a single income doesn’t always support the lifestyle, the house payment, the car payment.”

Prof Skripak is overseeing Pamplin’s transition away from a full-time MBA degree to offer only part-time MBA programmes. Virginia Tech made the decision to go all part-time — offering executive, evening and weekend programmes — last year after watching its full-time MBA applications drop and part-time applications rise for the past three or four years.