For example, UCLA has Anderson, Columbia has CBS, UChicago has Booth, Duke has Fuqua, northwestern has Kellogg… for some strange reason, they are only meant for grad students.
why don’t more fantastic universities like these make their business schools undergrad business schools as well?
Nothing strange about it. Same reason why there’s no undergraduate law schools. I have heard that employers feel that you need professional training (i.e. graduate business degree) and some experience to be viewed as a manager or executive with potential.
Because an undergrad business degree is a dime a dozen?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304072004577323754019227394
Like the article said, many schools used to view business as a trade, and historically students did not go to Harvard and Yale to become an accountant.
Dime a dozen…hope my kid gets more value than that out of his Wharton undergrad degree. I think the OP’s post is a reasonable question. The problem is more likely that nearly every university, no matter the academic rigor, is pumping out kids with business degrees. With so many business degrees out there, the value of that degree has to go down.
The “elite” business jobs (e.g. management consulting) preferentially recruit from highly selective and prestigious colleges and apparently do not mind that they do not have undergraduate business majors (although some have business-type electives hidden in their economics or other departments). So the highly selective schools do not have much reason to open undergraduate business majors if they do not already have them.
You are absolutely correct when it comes to your kids Wharton UG. For full disclosure, it might have been beneficial to add that the Wharton degrees are not the middling BBA degrees issued around the clock. The parallels of the Wharton BS or BA in Economics are to similar degrees in Economics, and not to what the previous posters called a dime a dozen.
Most schools with prestigious graduate business degrees such as the MBA see little need to have a degree in business at the UG level. There are a few notable exceptions such as UT at Austin.
Same can be said with any degree, sociology,English,political science, psychology, history etc.
Wharton’s degree is an economics degree requiring at least 40% courses in liberal arts. I think we can all agree that Wharton is the exception for job placements, unlike other business programs.
Top schools with undergrad business programs, in addition to Wharton, include Cormell, UC Berkeley, MIT, WUStL, NYU, Michigan, UNC Chapel Hill among others.
Penn Wharton is probably most distinguished from elite business employers’ point of view by the fact that it is housed in a highly selective university (and Wharton might be slightly more selective than the university overall).
Note that many of the highly regarded undergraduate business majors at non-super-selective universities have higher admission selectivity than their universities overall, which may be why they get more recruiting attention (compared to “dime a dozen” business majors at other schools).
I think your premise is misguided. The vast majority of universities do have undergrad business. It’s only a handful of (mostly) elite schools that do not.
More or less!
For instance, the “newer” degree at Cornell is the general business degree program called Applied Economics and Management. It is offered in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences
Similar distinctions might exist at a number of schools listed. For example, http://mitsloan.mit.edu/undergrad/
@xiggi Why shouldn’t schools with great MBA programs - like Columbia - open its doors to undergrad business students?
Especially for students who want to work in Finance right after school (like Investment Banking or Consulting), this would be an amazing option.
Plenty of kids get jobs in finance right out of undergrad from Columbia - JarJar- what is your point?
Columbia attracts the consulting and investment banking recruiters without needing to offer an undergraduate business major. (It does offer some finance courses in its economics department, for those who want to learn some finance-specific material.)
@blossom I know that. My point is, undergrad business schools at schools LIKE Columbia might be better options for students wanting to head into finance and related fields.
Also the material they’d learn at these schools would be more applicable to what they want to pursue once they finish college.
Let’s look at history to figure out why. Specifically, the top of the MBA heap (the M7 schools). Of those 7, Harvard and Stanford are the only 2 who have always been graduate-only. They started those professional schools to train managers (in HBS’s case, originally for civil service). They probably figured that profession-specific training probably made more sense as an overlay on a liberal arts education.
Chicago, Columbia, and Northwestern originally had undergraduate business degrees, but they dropped them around WWII. In Northwestern’s case, it’s because the business faculty wanted to concentrate resources on graduate education; they’d rather build a great MBA program than get spread too thin teaching both grad students and undergrads. And it worked! Kellogg is now in the M7 and considered top-tier by pretty much everyone. That may have been the reason why Chicago and Columbia dropped their undergrad business programs as well, though around that time, both those schools turned more academic/intellectual too; you have to remember that for the longest time, many of the top universities in this country did not see themselves as finishing schools for industry, but rather as academies in the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
So that leaves MIT and Penn as the only M7 schools who have kept a full undergraduate business school.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean that you can’t take business classes as an undergrad at the 3 schools who dropped their undergraduate business degrees.
Chicago allows undergrads to take a limited number of business classes. Northwestern has the Kellogg certificates, the Business Institutions minor, and a new Kellogg Masters program that is only open to NU undergrads (that you have to apply to get in to). Columbia has some business major (that you have to apply to get in to).
The banking recruiters know they can teach a Columbia History or Poli Sci major what they need to know to function. And kids who want to study finance as an undergrad have plenty of other options.
I’m still not grasping your point. Not every college teaches every possible aspect of human endeavor. An institution sets its own priorities and educational agenda. Sometimes an outside accrediting agency does the work (you can’t become licensed as a Physical Therapist in my state with just a BA. So PT is a grad level program at the local college). And sometimes the college itself does the work (Harvard has a Divinity school but Brown does not).
So the issue is…???
Because they are useless if they are not a prestigious university.
The issue is cake and eating it. JarJar would like to go to a prestige school AND major in business so as to get a presumed leg up on the Holy Grail of investment banking. His choices are more limited than he’d like.