Pepperdine's Fully Employed MBA

It is 677. You can google it - https://www.anderson.ucla.edu/x19596.xml

You are investing into the rest of your life - you may want to look into other factors than commute.

As a fellow resident of Southern California, I have also looked into the part-time programs at Pepperdine, UCLA, and USC.

My ranking - and it's not even a close competition:
1) UCLA
2) USC
3) UC-Irvine (and I haven't even visited this school)
4) Pepperdine or a CSU campus

UCLA is by far the most selective and most respected part-time (as well as full-time) MBA program in Southern California. USC's MBA.PM program has an average GPA/GMAT of roughly 3.1/620. Be warned, USC (Marshall) is very insecure about its position in the bschool rankings vs. UCLA.

I used to live in Thousand Oaks and my preferences for a PT MBA (when I was researching that option) was UCLA and USC.

My concern with the Pepperdine MBA was that it may not be as valuable outside of SoCal.

Thank you all for your responses. I appreciate it.

I'd say Pepperdine is a really good school. The average gmat score to get in is 640, and they're huge on work experience. In my opinion, they have a better mba program than UC Irvine, and I wouldn't even consider going to a CSU for an MBA.

Pepperdine's fully employed program is huge and is easier to get into than their full-time program. A lot of job opportunities arise from being in the middle of a huge network, though. Pepperdine's program is massive- Largest program (by amount of students) in LA.

If you don't get into UCLA or USC, I think you should go to Pepperdine. Just don't be like one of my friends who has been preparing for the GMAT for the past 3 years.

As for rankings, I've seen Pepperdine ranked in Forbes (the top 60 programs), Businessweek, and Financial Times. I've thought of going there...It's not an "ultra elite" program, but it's a really good, respected program...I have friends in it and they all like it.