I can’t decide whether to major in accounting or economics.
Do you mean undergraduate (as opposed to MBA) business schools?
But note that economics is normally considered a liberal arts subject usually not offered within a business school, so schools without business schools typically offer that as a major. Undergraduate business majors do include some economics as well as other topics based mostly on other social studies subjects.
Most if not all ivies have economics
You can check the websites of each Ivy school to see which ones offer undergraduate business.
U Penn and Cornell for undergrad.
Most Ivies and high end privates do not offer undergrad accounting degrees. These types of pre-professional degrees are considered beneath high end LAC’s, and the nearest business degree is economics. Exceptions include Cornell and Penn which do offer undergraduate accounting degrees.
People with accounting degrees are generally more employable. In business schools, accounting is typically considered the most math intensive and difficult of the business degrees, followed by finance, economics, management, and marketing in that order. If you intend to go into accounting, your best best is to attend a large flagship public university is is popular with corporate recruiters.
The only “math” that accounting requires is arithmetic and the simplest of algebra.
@zinhead - If Wharton (Penn) offers an undergraduate accounting major I cant imagine how it is “beneath” LACs. It is just that most LACs offer students a liberal arts course of study (although few notable exceptions do offer disciplines such as business and/or engineering). (PS And as a CPA I don’t think accounting is terribly math intensive – certainly high level math is not required).
@happy1 - HYPS and other high end schools like Northwestern, et al. traditionally have viewed themselves as schooling the future leaders of society. Accounting is something is that CEO’s hire other people to do for them, not something that they do themselves. While accounting does not require high end math, it does require a large amount of addition and subtraction which a great many people find boring.
If you want to do a top mba, you’re better off not studying business as an undergraduate. Majoring in stem, critical languages and/or economics would be a better choice.
A CEO worth his or her salt should be able to understand an income statement, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows… at least. Those are accounting snapshots of a company’s health. Students learn how to construct and comprehend them in a Financial Accounting class.
It doesn’t really matter what the major is, or the title of the degree, but for students who want a broad business education, you need to be taking the following classes: Ops Management, Strategic Management, Corporate Finance, Financial and Managerial Accounting, IT Mgmt/MIS, Org Behavior, Marketing, and Econ (Micro and Macro).
International Business is good too – to learn the principles of international trade, currency, etc.
And an Entrepreneurialism class is helpful to understand how to get a business started – handling the barriers to entry, securing funding, etc. Knowledge from the rest of the classes will help you to keep it running smoothly.
“Most Ivies and high end privates do not offer undergrad accounting degrees. These types of pre-professional degrees are considered beneath high end LAC’s, and the nearest business degree is economics. Exceptions include Cornell and Penn which do offer undergraduate accounting degrees.”
Zinhead, while I am no fan of undergraduate business programs or certificates, I do not agree with your comment above. Many “high end universities” (and I do not see why you are leaving out public elites like Cal, Michigan, UNC, UVa, W&M etc…) offer undergraduate programs in Business. In fact, well over half of the country’s top 30 universities do:
Boston College
Carnegie Mellon University
College of William and Mary
Cornell University
Emory University
Georgetown University
Johns Hopkins University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
New York University
University of California-Berkeley
University of Michigan-Ann Arbor
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill
University of Notre Dame
University of Pennsylvania
University of Southern California
University of Virginia
Wake Forest University
Washington University-St Louis
Northwestern currently offers two Kellogg Certificate programs. I would not be surprised if it eventually switched to a full blown degree program.
Zinhead - this will be my last post on this so we can agree to disagree.
I think the top schools are perfectly happy to educated business leaders but some never had an undergrad program and just don’t see a reason to add it. HYS have grad business schools and send many of their undergraduates to banks and consulting firms and the most common major at Princeton has an investment banking type of major (don’t know name but know several people who went thru that program and got IB jobs) so I think they are not unhappy when graduates get jobs.
Re accounting: That is what calculators and spreadsheets are for. Very little of accounting is not number crunching these days… And a reasonably high percentage of CEOs have come up the accounting/financial route so I’d differ with you on that as well.
But for the OP the answer is Dyson at Cornell and Wharton at UPenn.
Columbia, Chicago, and Northwestern use to have undergraduate b-schools but dropped them soon after WWII.
@Alexandre, I don’t see Northwestern restarting an undergraduate b-school any time soon (within the next several decades). With the Kellogg certificates, Integrated Marketing Communications and Entrepreneurship certificate programs, IE and MMSS majors, Business Institutions minor, a Kellogg MS program that is only open to NU undergrads, and being a target school for both consulting and Wall Street, NU already offers almost everything that someone would want out of b-school (other than a path to a CPA). Note that NU dropped the undergrad b-school program to focus resources on the MBA program in order to make it world-class, and you can’t really argue with the results of the strategy considering that Kellogg is one of the top 7 MBA programs in the US.
PurpleTitan, I think undergraduate business programs will become more prevalent among elite universities as demand for such programs grow. I agree that Northwestern has ample options for students seeking business programs will have many options to choose from.
@Alexandre, starting a full-fledged undergraduate b-school is a massive expensive undertaking. Which is why, even though Columbia now offers a “concentration” in business (but not a major), Princeton offers a certificate in finance, and Rice offers a minor in business (and the first 2 are pretty new programs), you have not seen any elite anywhere start/restart a full undergraduate b-school. I suppose if someone is willing to donate $500M-1B for the express purpose of starting such a school, someone will do so, but I don’t see that happening.
“…starting a full-fledged undergraduate b-school is a massive expensive undertaking.”
“I suppose if someone is willing to donate $500M-1B for the express purpose of starting such a school…”
Not really PurpleTitan. In many instances, there would be no need to start a new school. Chicago, Columbia, Harvard and Northwestern have existing MBA programs with enormous faculties, ample classroom space, massive endowments and graduate student enrollments in the 1,500+ range. Absorbing 600-800 undergraduate students should be relatively easy considering their $10 billion+ endowments, generous alumni donations etc…It certainly will not cost $1 billion to do so.
That being said, I agree that it will take time, possibly decades. But I think more and more students are demanding business as a degree option, with full access to the resources of the Business school, including, more than anything, absolute access to the business school curriculum, faculty, facilities and career office. This will be a demand-driven decision. Universities will either adapt and evolve or lose out.
@Alexandre, they have those massively rich graduate b-school programs of high standing that they have absolutely zero interest in watering down or straining simply to start an undergraduate b-school. Ask any of those universities whether they would rather have a top 7 MBA program and no undergraduate b-school or a top 15 MBA program and top 15 undergrad b-school program and every single one would opt for the former each time.
So if there is no extra money coming and they do not want to raid the endowment, 600-800 undergrads would mean much bigger MBA class sizes or faculty teaching a ton more. Yeah, I don’t think so either.
Plus, you’ll note that Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, and Stanford aren’t exactly facing a lack of demand for admission in to their freshmen classes.
“Ask any of those universities whether they would rather have a top 7 MBA program and no undergraduate b-school or a top 15 MBA program and top 15 undergrad b-school program and every single one would opt for the former each time.”
Wharton, Sloan, Stern and Ross seem to balance top 5 BBA programs with top 10 MBA programs just fine. 
“Plus, you’ll note that Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, Northwestern, and Stanford aren’t exactly facing a lack of demand for admission in to their freshmen classes.”
As far as talented students go, Harvard and Stanford are in a league of their own. They will likely remain so for a long time. Chicago, Columbia and Northwestern (as well as other elites without business degree programs) are subject to different realities. There was a time when college education was about self-discovery. Those days are slowly but surely slipping way. Spending a chunk of change on self-discovery no longer holds appeal to most parents and students… Most college-bound students are seeking the surest path to gainful employment. From what I have observed, and I may be wrong, over time, most universities that do not have elite engineering and business programs will see their applicant pools dwindle. Universities like Chicago, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke and NU have the resources and existing capital to make the transition relatively painless. Will it happen in the short to mid term (1-10 years)? Most likely not. But in the long term (10+ years), I think it is a distinct possibility.
@Alexandre, I have not seen the applicant pools to Chicago, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, and NU dwindle at all nor do I see any signs that they will in the near or even far future.
Chicago doesn’t offer either business or engineering to undergrads (other than a new niche engineering program) and has seen their applicant base grow more than anyone (albeit from a lower level) in recent years.