A new survey of IT professionals reveals that those with a master of business administration degree earn nearly half again as much as those with no advanced degree and also do better than those who completed other master’s programs.

The University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business analyzed data from 50,000 information technology professionals, and concluded that an MBA degree increases an IT professional’s salary by 46 percent compared with just a bachelor’s degree, and 37 percent compared with other master’s degrees. The data, dealing with salaries from 1999 to 2002, show that in 1999 dollars, the difference amounts to $24,000 and $17,000, respectively.

There are “much larger returns on education than experience” in this field, said Sunil Mithas, Smith assistant professor and lead author of the study. Technical skills, he explained, “become obsolete,” while the concepts learned in the classroom last longer.

The peer-reviewed study will be published this month in the journal Management Science.

What may be true in the IT sector, however, is not necessarily true in other industries, say experts who assert that the value of an MBA depends on the type of work.

“Companies and the federal government look for years of experience before a degree,” said George Newstrom, president and chief operating officer of Fairfax-based Lee Technologies.

Newstrom noted that when he was hiring a large number of IT employees for EDS, the “skill sets we needed” were focused on the “technical component,” not those acquired at business schools.

On the other hand, he added, if “you’re in a consulting-type enterprise, having a higher-level degree is something that is desired,” because a company can charge more for services provided by their employees with advanced degrees.

In the midst of an economic slowdown, in the Washington-Baltimore region, the average IT salary jumped 2.3 percent in 2007, from $79,911 in 2006 to $81,750 in 2007, according to a salary survey conducted by online technology job search company Dice.

With virtual full employment and the federal government as a customer, the metro area “still has a lot of growth” in the IT sector, Newstrom said.

wblake@dcexaminer.com