A Down-to-Business Introduction to Business Schools

By W. Randy Hoffman
BusinessSchools.com Contributing Writer

Do you wind up the leader of almost every group project you get involved in? Do other people frequently ask you for financial advice? Do you watch "The Apprentice" and similar TV shows and say to yourself, "I could do better than all these people"? You might never get to be the president of a multi-billion-dollar company, but businesses all over the world need people with managerial and financial skills. They can promote non-managerial employees into management or positions of financial responsibility, but the famous "Peter Principle" predicts that many such internal candidates, however competent they might be at their original jobs, won't be competent to supervise other people or handle money. If you get training in business administration, you'll have skills that firms everywhere are looking for.

Whether you're finishing high school and want an important, rewarding career, or you've been a working college graduate for years and want to improve your prospects, a business school can be the avenue to fulfilling your dreams. This article gives you some things to think about if you're considering attending one.

The History of Business Education

In its earliest manifestation as "trade," business is another of the professions that has been with us for millenia. Human communities understood early on that trading goods they had in abundance for goods they didn't have could enrich everyone involved. Simple bartering was eventually superseded by buying and selling with coin, then by mercantilism, then in the Renaissance by corporations and finance. For a very long time, "business education" consisted only of learning from one's parents and elders how to appraise the value of trade goods, or how to buy and sell wisely in the marketplace. In more recent times in Europe and her colonies, one might apprentice to a master or manager in a company or "counting-house," as Scrooge and Marley did at Fezziwig's establishment in A Christmas Carol. But during the 1800s, corporations (and their money) proliferated, management and workers came into increasingly bitter conflict with each other, and the Industrial Revolution and its excesses transformed society -- frequently in damaging ways. By the end of the century it became apparent to the liberal-arts academic community that business apprenticeships and non-business college training alone were not adequately preparing people to function in the business world.

As Esther Yogev writes, "The strong movement towards the incorporation and bureaucratization of firms had already raised weighty questions...[H]ow was the liberal ethos to be preserved in a place where modern business organization was becoming a new kind of property, and the individual’s chances of survival depended on his entering some form of association?...What would happen to little entrepreneurs when they had to compete with big ones, and what would happen to the ordinary worker?...Even rugged individualists realized that the liberal context was changing and some reorganization would be necessary." She goes on to report that Progressives among industry and academe concluded, "Re-educated and endowed with expert, ethical management, ['good'] corporations could be important community assets that served the public. Correct, humanistic management of the corporation would make it work for the benefit of the community rather than rich, power-hungry vested interests. To that end, a new business leadership was required that knew its job and was committed to the public it served. Thus the university would enter as a suitable trainer of corporate managers."

The first school for business management in the US, the Wharton School, was established in Philadelphia in 1881; it's still extant, affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania, today. Dartmouth and the University of Wisconsin added business-administration departments in 1891, as did Harvard in 1908. Colleges quickly adopted the idea of teaching business management as a public service to society: Queen's University in Kingston, ON, started a School of Commerce in 1919; New York University began the practice of training business teachers in 1926; and one hundred and twenty business programs were in operation by 1939. However, the quality of education in these business programs varied widely, and they eventually gained a stigma of poor scholarship. Following critical reports by the Ford Foundation in the early 1960s and others in the 1980s, schools began to apply higher standards in hiring faculty and to require better and more applicable teaching from them. Now many colleges and most major universities have strong and rigorous business programs.

For decades after business education got started, it was expected that the type of business training given at career and trade schools would be suitable for secretarial and clerical positions, while management training would be reserved for colleges (and graduate schools in particular). But following the emergence of community colleges in the 1960s and 1970s and the explosion of for-profit and online career schools starting in the 1990s, management training and other higher-level business education has become available to almost anyone, anywhere, in all kinds of educational contexts.