© Nathan Mandell Assistant Dean Julie Cisek Jones and Dean Dipak C. Jain

Reprinted with permission of the Miami Herald, which published this story Oct. 24. The original content has been edited for use in Kellogg World.

Come January, Jocelyn Cortez will begin studies for an executive MBA from Northwestern University, and she has no intention of leaving her South Beach digs to do it.

Instead, the 30-year-old Miamian will keep her downtown job as an investment counselor at Citibank and join the first class of the Kellogg School of Management's new executive MBA program in Miami.

Kellogg—among the nation's most prestigious business schools—has already exported its EMBA program to such far-flung locales as Tel Aviv, Frankfurt, Hong Kong and Toronto to attract international students. Now, with an eye to luring mid-career Latin American managers as well as South Floridians, it's setting up shop in Coral Gables.

Kellogg professors will fly to South Florida and hold classes with the program students in sessions running Thursdays through Sundays once a month. Initially, they'll meet at the Hyatt Regency in Coral Gables as the school prepares its own site next to the hotel.

"We are doing this so that we have the opportunity to both access the Latin American economy and the overall business community in Southeast Florida," said Julie Cisek Jones, assistant dean and director for executive MBA programs at Kellogg, which is based in Evanston, Ill. "We have been working on this for three years."

Expanding to Miami is a smart strategy on Kellogg's part, said Maury Kalnitz, managing director of the Executive MBA Council, a nonprofit university association based in Orange County, Calif.

The school has found an "underserved market" in South Florida - one that is hungry to house a high-ranked, first-tier business school, he said.

Kellogg hopes to attract a blend of Latin American and South Florida executives to its Miami outpost. So far, the school has admitted approximately a 50-50 mix for its first semester, although its application deadline hasn't yet passed.

Students will take 29 classes over two years. Kellogg makes no distinction on its degree between the MBA program and the EMBA program, said Cisek Jones.

The typical student in the Miami program will have eight to 10 years of business experience, Cisek Jones said. The first class, which will start in January, will have about 35 to 40 students.

Classes will be taught by 32 Kellogg faculty members, who will commute to Miami once a month. The Miami program will be modeled after the EMBA curriculum in Evanston.

Students will have the opportunity to take electives focused on the Latin American economy. All courses will be taught in English.

The arrival of Kellogg comes at a time when business schools are offering an increasing number of EMBA programs as a way to reel in would-be students who don't want to leave work and attend school full-time. Top-ranked programs typically recruit executives who already have almost a decade of experience on their résumés.

Marco Baldocchi, a student from El Salvador who will start the Kellogg program in January, estimates that his commute to Miami will take about two and a half hours, plus the time it takes to get through airport security.

"Travel, in this case, is not that big of a deal," said Baldocchi, president of the San Salvador-based Prestomar group of companies.

Richard Sorensen, dean of Virginia Tech's Pamplin College of Business and chairman of the board for the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, suggested that an EMBA title "has a certain cachet to it."

He added: "People like it. It's over and above the traditional MBA."

Enrollment in full-time MBA programs typically vacillates with the ebb and flow of the economy, said Sorensen. During downturns, MBA schools attract more students, while a strong job market tends to draw more prospective students to work.

"Until about 10 or 15 years ago, you didn't have many MBA programs outside of the United States," Sorensen said. "Now they are spreading like wildfire. The same thing is happening with the EMBA."