Many students at top business schools majored in Humanities/Social Science—how does this work?

College Majors Humanities Majors
1

Looking at class profiles from Stanford Business School, Wharton, UChicago, Harvard, and Columbia, a large chunk of their students majored in either Humanities/Social Science.

In general, how does this work? A few more specific questions:

What classes did they take?/What did they specifically study within Humanities or Social Science? What jobs did they get in between undergrad and grad?

Mind you, I’m still a high school senior and know very little about undergrad to graduate connections, so apologies if this is a silly question.

2

It’s not at all a silly question. The same question comes up often with respect to law school. What both B school and law school are looking for is ability in critical thinking and analysis. An economics or business undergraduate may give you a head start in understanding some material, but the purpose of your undergraduate education is to teach you to think, to analyze, and to be able write and talk about your conclusions. You can major in almost anything.

3

@AboutTheSame What job experience do you think people with a Humanities degree had before applying to business school?

4

There were many students at Dartmouth who had internships with various investment banking/etc. firms. I think anything in the financial sector would do.

5

Take macro and micro Econ and calculus at the college level, and get good grades in them.

6

@AboutTheSame a humanities degree would help with getting those types of jobs? Sorry, new to this!

7

At top MBA programs, a lot of times the entering students had jobs in strategy consulting, finance (IB, hedge funds, private equity, venture capital, etc.) or tech companies (often in program management roles).

Many MBAs post their incoming class profile on the website. At HBS, 15% of incoming students were working in consulting before beginning; 11% worked in financial services, 15% worked in high tech/communications, and 15% in venture capital/private equity. That’s 56% of the entering class in those four sectors.

At Wharton, 23% of the incoming class worked in consulting, 11% in investment banking, 10% in private equity/venture capital, and 6% in technology. That’s 50% of the class. An additional 13% worked in investments or other financial services.

At Stanford, 16% come from consulting, 16% from private equity or venture capital, 15% from technology, and 8% from financial services. That’s 55% of the class.

Of course that means, though, that 35-45% of the class comes from other fields. Government, healthcare, education, energy, real estate, entertainment, and consumer goods/retail are other areas people commonly work before starting the MBA program.

Humanities and social science majors can get jobs in nearly all of those fields with their majors. It kind of depends. Elite school graduates often end up in top investment banks and strategy consulting firms - their major doesn’t matter as much as where they went to college. But even in other smaller consulting agencies or across the other represented fields a person with a humanities or social science major can easily find themselves doing something meaningful and returning for an MBA later.