The Best Business Schools 2012

Javaree Walker entered the University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business in the fall of 2011 with a decision to make: Should he pursue the full-time MBA or the one-year MS in business administration with a concentration in marketing? After two months of deliberation, he chose the master’s in marketing. It’s not that the quality of the MBA was lacking, but for someone who knew exactly what he wanted to do when he graduated, the two-year business degree was simply too broad. “I wanted to learn marketing,” Walker says. “I didn’t need to know about stocks and derivatives.”

In the MS program, Walker was able to pack in eight marketing courses, along with a few basic business classes, all at less than two-thirds the cost and in half the time of the traditional MBA. By graduation this summer, the 30-year-old Hempstead (N.Y.) native had already lined up work as a marketing specialist at Menomonee Falls (Wis.)-based Actuant. “The job fit is everything I was looking for,” he says.