The World before (and Shortly after) Wharton

This chapter examines why educational leaders and businessmen in the United States thought it was a good idea to establish business schools in the first place. The answer often offered at the time was that American business itself had grown so big and complex by the turn of the twentieth century that a new university-level education was now required for the new world of managerial work. However, the more powerful rationale was that businessmen wanted the social status and cultural cachet that came with a university degree. The chapter then looks at the Wharton School of Finance and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1881 and became the first business school in the United States. All of the more than six hundred business schools founded in the nearly century and a half since descend from Wharton.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of American business schools. While at one level business schools stand as of a piece of the way American universities have grown and evolved since the end of the Civil War, they stand apart from the rest of higher education in three, interconnected ways. First, they have consistently disappointed even their most enthusiastic boosters—failing to develop a definition of professional business education, failing to develop a coherent, intellectually vibrant body of knowledge, unable to agree on what the raison d'être of business schools ought to be—to an extent simply not true of any other academic pursuit. Despite this, of course, business schools have flourished on U.S. campuses and continue to do so. Second, the late nineteenth-century revolutions in higher education fostered a change in how universities were funded and governed. For the businessmen who now presided over higher education, a business school on their campus might hold a special place in their hearts. Finally, business schools serve as the handmaids to corporate capitalism in the United States in a way that no other campus enterprise does.