Tiffany Willis saw the writing on the wall. She had plenty of corporate experience in accounting, auditing and consulting but knew she would need more if she hoped to lead a team: Job listings for positions she wanted said “MBA preferred.” And she admired how colleagues who had the degree approached problems.

“I was missing out,” she says. So she enrolled in a program at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School that put her in class every other weekend. When Willis graduated in 2015, she had multiple job offers and landed at financial services technology company Fiserv as head of operational audit and advisory services.