Business School

A business school is a university-level institution that confers degrees in Business Administration. It teaches topics such as accounting, finance, information systems, marketing, organizational behavior, strategy, human resource management, and quantitative methods.

Types of business school

They include schools of business, business administration, and management. There are four principal forms of business school.

1. Most of the university business schools are faculties, colleges or departments within the university, and teach predominantly business courses.
2. In North America a business school is often understood to be a university graduate school which offers a Master of Business Administration or equivalent degree.
3. Also in North America the term "business school" can refer to a different type of institution: a two-year school that grants the Associate's degree in various business subjects. Most of these schools began as secretarial schools, then expanded into accounting or bookkeeping and similar subjects. They are typically operated as businesses, rather than as institutions of higher learning.
4. In Europe and Asia, some universities teach only business.

Notable business school firsts

• 1759 - The Aula do Comércio in Lisbon was the world's first institution to specialise in the teaching of commerce. It provided a model for development of similar government-sponsored schools across Europe, and closed in 1844. [1]
• 1819 - The Ecole Supérieure de Commerce of Paris (now ESCP-EAP European School of Management) was founded. It is the oldest business school in the world. [2]
• 1881 - The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania was founded as the first business school within a broader university
• 1889 - The predecessor of Manchester Metropolitan University Business School was founded as the first school teaching commerce in the United Kingdom. [3]
• 1898 - The University of St. Gallen established, the first university in Switzerland teaching business and economics.
• 1898 - The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business was the first business school to offer a PhD program and an Executive MBA program. It is the first business school to have a Nobel laureate on its faculty: George Stigler won the prize after retiring from the school in 1981. It is also the first business school to have six Nobel laureates on its faculty.
• 1898 - The College of Commerce at the University of California, Berkeley, later renamed the Haas School of Business, was founded as the first business school at a public university
• 1900 - The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College was founded as the first graduate school of business, offering the first master's degree in business administration, titled the "Master of Commercial Science"
• 1907 - The École des Hautes Études Commerciales de Montréal (HEC Montréal) was founded as the first business school in Canada [4]
• 1909 - Stockholm School of Economics or Handelshögskolan i Stockholm was founded as the first institution dedicated to business and economics in Sweden.
• 1910 - Harvard Business School was the first business school to offer a degree called the "MBA"
• 1911 - Helsinki School of Economics or Helsingin kauppakorkeakoulu was founded as the first Finnish-language institution dedicated to business and economics in Finland.
• 1949 - The University of Pretoria was the first University outside the United States to offer an MBA [5]
• 1955 - The Institute of Business Administration, Karachi established by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania as the first university in Asia to offer an MBA program.
• 1957 - INSEAD, near Paris, France, became the first European institution to offer an MBA program.
• 1958 - Fundação Getúlio Vargas was the first business school founded in Latin America to offer an MBA-type qualification
• 1966 - The National Institute of Development Administration or NIDA was the first graduate school that offer an MBA program in Thailand
• 1973 - The École des Affaires de Paris (EAP) (now ESCP-EAP) was the first business school with campuses in three countries
• 1991 - The IEDC-Bled School of Management was the first business school to offer an MBA program in Eastern Europe.
• 1992 - The Thunderbird School of Global Management was the first business school to have campuses on three continents.

Business school degrees

• Associate's Degree: AA, AAB, ABA, AS
• Bachelor's Degrees: BBA, BBus, BComm, BSBA, BAcc, BABA, BBS, and BSc
• Doctoral Degrees: Ph.D., DBA, DHA, DM, Doctor of Commerce (DCOM), FPM
• Master's Degrees: MBA, Masters in Business and Management (MBM), MM, MAcc, MMR, MSMR, MPA, MSM, MHA, MSF, MSc, MST, Masters in Management Studies (MMS) and MCOMM. At Oxford and Cambridge business schools an MPhil, or Master of Philospophy, is awarded in place of an MA or MSc.
• Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management (PGDBM), Post Graduate Program (PGP) in Business Management, Post Graduate Program (PGP) in Management

Business school use of case studies

Some business schools center their teaching around the use of case studies. Case studies have been used in graduate and undergraduate business education for nearly one hundred years. Business cases are historical descriptions of actual business situations. Typically, information is presented about a business firm's products, markets, competition, financial structure, sales volumes, management, employees and other factors affecting the firm's success. The length of a business case study may range from two or three pages to 30 pages, or more.

Business schools often obtain case studies published by Harvard Business School. Harvard's most popular case studies include Lincoln Electric Co.[6] and Google, Inc.[7].

Students are expected to scrutinize the case study and prepare to discuss strategies and tactics that the firm should employ in the future. Three different methods have been used in business case teaching:

1. Prepared case-specific questions to be answered by the student. This is used with short cases intended for undergraduate students. The underlying concept is that such students need specific guidance to be able to analyze case studies.
2. Problem-solving analysis. This second method, initiated by the Harvard Business School is by far the most widely used method in MBA and executive development programs. The underlying concept is that with enough practice (hundreds of case analyses) students develop intuitive skills for analyzing and resolving complex business situations. Click here for more information on the HBS case method. Successful implementation of this method depends heavily on the skills of the discussion leader.
3. A generally applicable strategic planning approach. This third method does not require students to analyze hundreds of cases. A strategic planning model is provided and students are instructed to apply the steps of the model to six to a dozen cases during a semester. This is sufficient to develop their ability to analyze a complex situation, generate a variety of possible strategies and to select the best ones. In effect, students learn a generally applicable approach to analyzing cases studies and real situations. This approach does not make any extraordinary demands on the artistic and dramatic talents of the teacher. Consequently most professors are capable of supervising application of this method.

History of business cases

When Harvard Business School was founded, the faculty quickly realized that there were no textbooks suitable to a graduate program in business. Their first solution to this problem was to interview leading practitioners of business and to write detailed accounts of what these managers were doing. Of course the professors could not present these cases as practices to be emulated because there were no criteria available for determining what would succeed and what would not succeed. So the professors instructed their students to read the cases and to come to class prepared to discuss the cases and to offer recommendations for appropriate courses of action. Basically that is the model still being used. See a critique of this approach.

Other approaches to business school

In contrast to the case method some schools use a skills-based approach in teaching business. This approach emphasizes quantitative methods, in particular operations research, management information systems, statistics, organizational behavior, modeling and simulation, and decision science. The goal is to provide students a set of tools that will prepare them to tackle and solve problems.

There are also several business school that still rely on the lecture method to give students a basic business education. Lectures are generally given from the professor's point of view, and rarely require interaction from the students unless notetaking is required.

Global Master of Business Administration ranking

Each year, well-known business publications such as Business Week, US News & World Report, Fortune, Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal publish rankings of selected MBA programs that, while controversial in their methodology, nevertheless can directly influence the prestige of schools that achieve high scores