Just to clarify a point mentioned earlier, everyone at Wharton undergrad graduates with a BS in Economics:
http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/academics/academics.cfm
If you want a BA in Economics at Penn, you do it through Arts and Sciences, not Wharton.
Penn Wharton has a page describing the difference between Wharton BS and A&S BA in economics:
http://www.wharton.upenn.edu/undergrad/academic-excellence/BS-versus-BA.cfm
Despite the title, the Wharton BS in economics is more like what one would see as a business curriculum in comparison to a liberal arts economics curriculum that the A&S BA in economics is.
Penn Wharton does have AACSB accreditation in business, but did not complete the most recent AACSB survey:
https://datadirect.aacsb.edu/public/profiles/profile.cfm?interstitialComplete=1&runReport=1&unitid=54833&userType=All
@compmom, many universities with top b-schools have added (or re-added, in many cases) business offerings at the undergraduate level. You can major in both Business and Financial Engineering now at Columbia. When you keep in mind that IE is essentially a quantitative business major, with a major in IE/Econ/MMSS, the Business Institutions minor, the Kellogg certificates, and Medill’s Integrative Marketing Institutions certificate, an undergrad at Northwestern can essential replicate a b-school curriculum if they so wish. And if that still isn’t enough, they can apply for a Kellogg MS that is only open to NU undergrads. Meanwhile, Chicago has long allowed its students to cross-register, so undergrads can take 6 classes (4 for credit) at Booth.
As I mentioned before, other than preparing you for the CPA, I’m hard-pressed to think of a business field that you can’t be well-prepared for straight out of undergrad at those 3 schools (or Harvard, where you can take classes at the Extension School).
Interest in studying a “practical” field like business as an undergrad does seem correlated with inequality and/or immigration. The last time the US was so unequal and had so many immigrants, around the turn of the last century, was when Northwestern, Chicago, and Columbia started undergrad business schools. Then immigration was stopped, inequality got better, and those 3 universities dropped their undergraduate business programs in mid-century. Now inequality is rising again, the foreign-born as a percentage of the population is back to where it was in the late 19th century, and universities are offering more business classes to undergrads again.
For that matter, Stanford’s Management Science & Engineering is essentially a business major. And Princeton offers a finance certificate.
It’s actually difficult to find an elite university that doesn’t have business offerings for undergrads these days.
Not too sure that many B-schools require Chemistry or Physics & programming/biotech…
@Bluebayou, they may not, but if you look at the courses in the major, 90% of them are courses that you’d find in a b-school curriculum.
Regarding business major course work, some of it is similar (though probably more applied) than courses found in other departments (mainly social studies departments like economics and sociology). So, even in the absence of an actual business department, someone interested in business topics can often find similar course work. Some schools without actual business departments have economics departments that offer more “business” electives.
One odd thing that might not have been completely explored here is that so many people are quick to dismiss bachelor’s degrees in usiness, but when that same content is Learned in an MBA program, all of a sudden it’s great stuff.
One problematic issue remains how to … define what a b-school curriculum with a degree of accuracy. The term “business” is so wide-ranging that almost anything might fit in a b-school purported curriculum.
Moop- nobody is saying that the content for a BS in Business is useless.
But kids studying organizational behavior- who have never actually worked for an organization, or kids taking a tough Valuation course without any concept of why a balance sheet is important-- it is less useful (in the opinion of some employers) than learning this stuff AFTER a few years of actual work experience. It’s not like anatomy where you can’t start operating on the human body without knowing which is the femur and which is the ulna. It’s about taking the building blocks of management (accounting, finance, production, marketing, etc.) and having no practical grounding in which to operate.
I interview new grads all the time who tell me about their degrees in International Business and then can’t construct a coherent hypothesis as to why an oil company in Saudi Arabia is cutting production now, or why an cellphone company in India has 95% penetration but only 80% in South America (or whatever the topic du jour on the front page of the newspaper happens to be). They may have memorized every formula for calculating NPV but they don’t understand why market share is an important metric or why the cost of raw materials isn’t a significant factor in pricing for some products but extremely important for others.
So teach these same concepts to someone who has been working in a corporation for 3-4 years- and it’s a different story.
Not odd at all. Just pragmatic. Don’t tell me you love “international business” if your courses haven’t taught you how to keep up with what’s happening in real world International Business.
“One odd thing that might not have been completely explored here is that so many people are quick to dismiss bachelor’s degrees in usiness, but when that same content is Learned in an MBA program, all of a sudden it’s great stuff”
What I learned as an MBA student was a) nowhere near as hard as what I learned as an econ/math major, even though I was at a top program and b) much better informed and much more useful because I’d actually spent real time in the business world and had real-life experience to draw against.
Is it? Seems that perceived value of an MBA is strongly tied to the business school’s prestige.
@xiggi: Not everything. I would be surprised if any b-school anywhere offers any chemistry courses, for instance.
But yes, take the IE, econ, psych, and stats departments (maybe philosophy/history/other SS for strategy), add in some marketing and accounting, and you have a b-school.
Throw in some sociology (for organizational behavior, management, etc.) as well.
Well, with the growth of specialty business majors it may be coming soon. If you have Quantitative Finance majors that are basically computer science majors in suits, why can’t you have a Petrochemical Management major that is basically a Petrochemical Engineering major with some accounting and finance courses thrown in? It’s not like anyone is standardizing this stuff and as long as something sounds like it pays a lot no one is going to notice.
@DmitriR, “traditional” quant finance is actually what you find in IE. The high-frequency shops love top CS students, but what they do isn’t what I consider finance.
And yes, true. I await the introduction of a combined business+linguistics major by someone.
“Seems that perceived value of an MBA is strongly tied to the business school’s prestige.”
Ding ding ding.
The value of a Harvard or Chicago MBA is not so much what you actually learn there. It is that you were able to get into a school that is very hard to get into.
Which is why many companies will recruit first year MBA students in August, before those students even show up for the first day of classes.
Which is also why undergrads of all types of majors at HYP have no trouble landing Wall Street finance jobs right out of school. An econ major certainly works for that.
Spot on, Northwesty.
(By the way, I don’t have an undergrad biz degree, so none of this is personal to me) Ok…I get what many of you are saying, but there is a bit of apples vs. oranges in your argument. Let’s say Fred gets a BS in accounting in 2000, then works until 2003, then studies for an MBA in finance 2004-6. And let’s say Sue gets a BA in history in 2000, works until 2003, and then studies for an MBA in finance 2004-6. What Pizzagirl and the rest of you are saying is that Sue in 2006 (and maybe even in 2003) is more capable than Fred is in 2000. Fine. But what I’m NOT hearing is why Sue is more capable in 2000 than Fred is in 2000, Or why she’s more capable in 2003 than Fred is in 2003. Or why she’s more capable in 2006 than Fred is in 2006.
PTitan:
The simple fact is that many biz majors couldn’t hack the hard sciences. So, that 10% will be a grade killer.
Note: The program at the Junior University will accept AP Physics C! (Yeah, how many high schoolers with a commerce interest are gonna get that far in science?)
It looks like to me that the program offered on The Farm is designed more for engineers who want to get off that track.