YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio – Dr. James Kravec decided to pursue a master’s in business administration about a decade after becoming involved with hospital administration.
Arriving at what is now Mercy Health-St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital in 2005 to practice clinical care medicine, Kravec became involved in administration in 2013. Now the chief clinical officer for Mercy Health-Lorain and Youngstown, he earned his MBA in 2025 from Youngstown State University.
“I [had] learned a ton of health-care administration, finance, [human resources], marketing, business operations, along with the medicine that I already knew, and I learned that very very practically, but I didn’t have formal training,” he says. “I wanted to have a formal training program with a formal degree, just as I did in medicine.”
Kravec might not appear to be the typical candidate for a MBA, but it’s actually common for nonbusinesspeople to pursue the degree.
A 2021 survey conducted for the Graduate Management Admission Council found that 51% of respondents majored in a nonbusiness field as undergraduates. Coming from fields as diverse as the sciences, arts and nonprofits, they pursue MBAs to advance or hone their skills in their current fields or prepare to move into their next chapter.
HEALTH CARE
Ellie Platt, owner of Platt insurance in Howland, received her undergraduate degree in organizational communications from Cedarville University in 2001. She received her MBA from Geneva College in 2008 while working in development at Meridian Health-
Care.
Through the MBA program, which held classes in the evenings and was geared toward adults, she was able to take courses that provided her with more technical skills, such as accounting, financial planning and strategic management.
“The path I was in at Meridian was more on the business side of the organization, so it was giving me a lot more of those technical business skills,” Platt says.
She credits Meridian CEO Larry Moliterno with inspiring her to pursue the degree.
“He really approached the nonprofit world from a business mindset,” she recalls. “A nonprofit doesn’t mean ‘no profit.’ They’re run a lot like businesses.”
FOUNDATION
Casey Krell, president of the Community Foundation of the Mahoning Valley, began reflecting on what she should do next during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Krell had earned her undergraduate degree in journalism and public relations from Mercyhurst College. She worked at Beatitude House in Youngstown, “doing a mix of marketing, communications and fundraising,” before joining the staff at the Community Foundation in 2014.
“While people think of nonprofits not as businesses, they are,” she concurs. “There’s a lot of really necessary business skill sets and expertise to run a successful nonprofit.”
That led her to determine an MBA was the correct next step for her. She had “real life experience” but felt she could use more formal education in understanding the business side of running an organization.
“I was really challenging myself to think about what was next for me, personally and professionally, and it had been something that I had wanted to do,” she says.
VILLAGE MANAGER
Antonio Diaz-Guy, village manager of East Palestine, had earned degrees in philosophy and economics from the University of Pittsburgh, with plans to either go into law school or investment banking.
He was discouraged from entering both fields. His philosophy professors counseled him against entering an “oversaturated legal market.” Investment bankers he knew described their working environment as “brutal” and tried to dissuade him by saying “‘We know you love your wife,’” he recalled.
Before becoming East Palestine village manager, he held various roles in local businesses, including running a medical imaging company and working in logistics.
“I learned a lot of business through the school of hard knocks,” he recalls. “I pursued an MBA because I had learned a considerable amount about business but lacked the formal credentials to prove it. I felt like an MBA provided objective credentials that could serve me in the future.”
EDUCATOR
Jared Johnson, chairman of the English Department at Thiel College in Greenville, Pa., already has a bachelor of arts in English and philosophy from Flagler College in Florida; a master of arts in English from the University of Tennessee; and a Ph.D. in English and cultural studies from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
He is pursuing an MBA at Thiel through a program that accepts one person from the college’s faculty or staff ranks every year.
“I knew of a few people who had done it, and they were from the staff line, but nobody’s ever taken the opportunity from the faculty line yet before me,” he says.
One of the reasons Johnson decided to pursue the MBA was he kept getting passed over for leadership positions, which he attributed to a “lack of business acumen,” he says.
“I wanted to acquire those skills so that I’d have a better chance of getting into administration,” he says.
MBA BENEFITS
From his experiences as an internal medicine physician and his work in hospital administration, Kravec – who continues to provide primary care services at Mercy – says was exposed to “a variety of circumstances and situations” in health-care administration.
“One area where I hadn’t gone into too much formal depth is in health-care finance, so being able to figure out more specifics of health-care finance on my own has been the biggest outcome of my MBA,” he continues. Other practical skills he developed through the program included being able to make greater use of artificial intelligence.
Platt says having an MBA opened doors for her when she launched Platt insurance in 2011. When representatives of Nationwide approached her about taking over an insurance agency, they saw the degree as an asset for a new owner. “They were really looking for not just people that were selling insurance policies, but people that were going to be able to grow and scale and run a business,” she says. “My MBA really opened my eyes to a bigger world out there where I was able to grow and scale my business through mergers and acquisitions.”
She also has applied the skills she developed through the program to the community work that she does. This includes the Rotary Club of Youngstown, where she is the current president, and Oh Wow! The Roger & Gloria Jones Children’s Center for Science & Technology, whose board she chaired until earlier this year.
The MBA earned from YSU didn’t provide Diaz-Guy with “any drastically new knowledge,” he acknowledges.
“What it did do is it just helped me sort of figure out how other people in business communicate,” he continues. “I would say the same thing but I would use different language, and it wasn’t always translated well. Plus I may have some rough edges, so it might have helped smooth me out as well.”
Diaz-Guy, who received his MBA from YSU, acknowledges the MBA program did not provide much information that was unfamiliar to him but his industry had “its own unique lingo” that wasn’t universally understood.
Krell says earning her MBA enlightened her and got her to work more closely in the financial management side of Community Foundation. She took on more roles around operations and shared with its then-president, Shari Harrell, her interest in taking more operational responsibility beyond the work she had been doing.
“Then it really helped as I transitioned to the president’s position here,” a role she assumed in 2024, she adds.
The skills she built and the education she received through the MBA supported her through her professional career.
Johnson says the MBA program’s leadership courses have helped him to see how organizations function and how leaders function within those organizations. “I’ve been able to evaluate my own leadership experience so far and also [that of] the people that I’ve served under,” he adds.
