@daddio3, supply chain management less rigorous? I’m going to hazard a guess that you’d never taken a supply chain/optimization class.
@martin18: the situation’s different in Canada. So if you’re applying to Canadian business schools OR Top 20 American undergrad business schools, you’re fine.
@daddio3 See the following.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704554104575435563989873060
Martin18
Many here just don’t knows what they are talking about. If you like business and dont get into Harvard and/or have no interest in Wall Street psychosis just go to the best B school you can get into and dont worry.
@Purpletitan, my undergrad is in engineering and Masters in Industrial Engineering. The Supply Chain classes were the easier ones. The hard ones were all the engineering sciences, math classes, and physics. There were some hard IE classes such as queuing theory, scheduling algorithms, and design of experiments, but mostly the APICS-type IE classes like in a Supply Chain program were pretty straightforward.
@Daddio3, if that’s your background, I can’t see how you can say accounting is more rigorous.
@barrons, nice list but that has a higher correlation to the number of students attending than it does to quality of education or any other point we have been discussing on this thread. I agree with your last comment about not stressing if you don’t go to Harvard, but just don’t use YOUR list to make your choices of where to apply 
Barrons- I wish your worldview included a perspective that there is value in studying the liberal arts (math, philosophy, literature, political science) that goes beyond their utility as a launching pad for a career as a barista/fast food worker.
I am happy to concede that a kid can get a terrific and well rounded business education at some of the schools on this list. (Kids- go to BYU, you’ll come out fluent in whichever language and culture you lived in during your two year Mission and you will have no trouble getting a job with a company doing business in that part of the world). You seem unwilling to learn/absorb an alternative point of view from your own- that there are young people TODAY working in terrific corporate jobs coming out of liberal arts backgrounds and doing just fine.
But kids- listen to Barrons. 'cause he spends a lot of time in Starbucks and knows which losers end up behind the counter.
And for the last time- any kid reading this who wants to major in finance or accounting- fantastic. But for any kid who breaks out in hives at the idea- there is still a path forward which won’t involve wearing an apron.
I’m all for happiness. Just have a backup plan. My sister was an art major. Then after being an in home nanny for a few years spent an extra year getting a cert at FIT in NYC. She has had a great career in fashion but not without FIT most likely.
daddio–or maybe most larger firms recruit at larger schools because they can fill their needs without making 100 trips.
.Mine recruited at just 6 for entire Midwest region. NU, UC, UW, UM, IU, UIUC. Plenty of good candidates.
- It occurs to me that one simple reason why more elite universities don't have undergraduate business programs is that it would be really difficult to put together a faculty that was up to the institution's standards. Most great business school faculty are talented enough to earn scads of money doing something other than teaching, research, and writing articles. I don't think the business school faculty market is a buyer's market the way other academic fields are. Yale started its graduate-level business school 40 years ago, and a former dean was president of Yale for 20 years, and the business school still struggles to achieve the kind of success expected of Yale programs. It's one of the weakest areas of the university. You can't just wake up one morning and say, "Hey! We should have a great undergraduate business program!" And some other things -- engineering, computer science, applied math, environmental science, neuroscience, genetics -- have seemed like more important areas to make a commitment to building quality.
- My sister was a Spanish Lit major (having dropped Geology after her third unsuccessful attempt to pass Physics). She worked part time for a stockbroker during college, and was able to get a job as a junior investment analyst. She has had a great career, serving as principal fund manager of several public mutual funds for the past 20-some years. And she didn't ever get a degree beyond her Spanish Lit BA, although one of her early employers paid for her to get a CFA certification.
@MYOS1634 I hear you loud and clear. My apologies to those I offended accidentally. I guess I have been on CC too long and thought calculus in high school is more common than it is in America.
We don’t do SAT here, so schools have to use other means to separate the students. A prof once told my friend that the senior calculus course is the “invisible sieve”. So when I hear folks say liberal art majors, many of whom never touched university prep math courses, are somehow better at critical thinking than business majors who have to offer them for admission, you can imagine my surprise.
@shawbridge I think the article is generally correct. For it to be more accurate, the author needs to separate the physical sciences into physics and chemistry. Multi/interdisciplinary studies must also be sub-divided. After all, a student with a major in communication and a minor in sociology is very different from one majoring in math and minoring in physics. If this were done, the article may not tell the story the author wants to tell, however.
@Martin18 please do not be discouraged by this discussion.
There are some very good points here in fact I am going to note the things blossom has mentioned to both of my children. I have a Math/Econ UG who has completed two coops at NEU and I am even more a fan of working at what you think you want to do prior to graduating with a degree in something you hate.
My daughter is going to college in the fall and is planning on majoring in Accounting-I must be the oddball parent who is telling her not to do so yet-she loves FL and history and even Shakespeare now! She loves other cultures-if she wants to be an accountant that is great it’s been very good to my family-but I want it to be a choice she makes for the right reason.
I believe wherever she goes she will take a strong liberal arts track-because I am a huge fan of being well rounded and her interests are very broad.
She is currently taking Calc and Stats-Stats is easy-Calc not so much. I never took that level of math so I have no idea what that means other than she is a strong math student but many kids seem to hit a wall at Calc.
The best thing any of us can do is to never stop learning about everything-
This is true, although I always thought that it was in no small part due to a lack of commitment to actual business and the mingling of non-profit and public policy in the ostensible mission of the school. The original degree was a MPPM, masters in private and public management, which probably helped populate the initial classes in the school, but in the long run wasn’t a winning strategy against established competition. They now award an MBA, and they changed their original name in 1994.
But you’re right about the issues regarding faculty and critical mass. To get to some minimal critical mass, places like all the ivy’s other than Cornell and Penn, and many other top liberal arts colleges would either have to expand dramatically, or repurpose their admissions policies in ways that simply aren’t practical. Princeton could certainly add a graduate program (in either business, law or medicine), since it has the endowment and the physical room to expand, but they aren’t likely to do it since there seems to be no pressing need, and things are going pretty well as they are. I think this is also the rough analysis for many other of the top smaller schools. No need to add an undergraduate business program. They’re doing just fine without one, and their graduates are not disadvantaged in any way in the competition for jobs in the sector that is most competitive.
Well said.
@dadx, Princeton actually has a graduate program in finance.
In any case, yes, you won’t see any elte university launch a full-blown undergraduate b-school because doing so would require an insane amount of money both at the beginning and going forward.
What you have seen (and may see more of) is what Northwestern, Columbia, Princeton, and Duke have done (establish relatively small certificate/minor/major/masters programs here and there to meet undergraduate demand for more business courses). Add in the IE/FE programs at Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Northwestern, and elsewhere, and most of the elites likely believe they offer enough business-related courses to undergrads. I don’t believe Stanford is interested in establishing a business major for kids who can’t pass freshman physics, for instance.
Stanford would have little interest in establishing a business major as long as it believes that a current program should satisfy most business-minded students:
http://economics.stanford.edu/files/Infobook_%202014-2015_3.pdf
With its core and specialty tracks, there are few gaping holes left that might compare unfavorably to degrees at the most selective business programs. After adding a sprinkling of the available seminars on business and entrepreneurship in technology, I am not sure why relabeling the available course would do, except to communalize the curriculum.
I did note that earlier, but also that it is tiny. About 30 students, I believe, or 30 degrees per year…can’t remember which.
Actually, a better discussion for individuals, and one that is “actionable”, is whether someone ought to go to Wharton or Sloan, or McIntyre, or another top undergraduate B school program, or instead go to say, Columbia or Harvard and obtain an economics or engineering degree (or even a fine arts degree). I think it is a tough decision. If you are interested in business, the calculus is essentially whether you can end up on roughly the same career track two to four years earlier or not. In my opinion, there isn’t a great deal of difference in the curriculum between top undergrad and top MBA programs. So the technical ability that you can cultivate isn’t that far apart between the two.
I do think, though, that a remarkable number of ug business majors end up returning to get an MBA. In my mind, this does call into question the wisdom or efficiency of that path. And at one time, many year ago, top MBA programs who were considering applicants with undergraduate business degrees wanted supplemental statements from them more specifically detailing what they hoped to gain by receiving an MBA. Not sure that its the case anymore, though.
Here are my thoughts on the matter:
Although I have a BBA in accounting, I think that most top schools and most top firms want people who can think and write clearly and well. They would prefer an undergrad degree in something else other than business with a graduate degree in business.For the record, I actually agree with this too for the most part. I don’t think schools should offer undergraduate degrees in general business, management or marketing. HOWEVER, there are some exceptions. I think schools should offer undergrad business degrees in specialized, tough areas such as accounting, computational finance, actuarial studies, and economics with a concentration in finance and banking and statistics , although statistics can be part of the math department. I am surprised that more top schools don’t have these majors.
Please define “top firms”. Please provide proof and show your work. I say BS. I have shown my proof already from multiple sources.
Nah. You win the internet. My business career was dismissed as anti-intellectual about ten pages ago.
Enjoy your prize.
There.