Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

Joseph Wharton, the school's founder and namesake

Joseph Wharton, a native Philadelphian, was a leader in industrial metallurgy who built his fortune through the American Nickel Company and Bethlehem Steel Corporation. As Wharton's business grew, he recognized that business knowledge in the United States was only taught through an apprenticeship system, and such a system was not viable for creating a wider economy during the Second Industrial Revolution.[13] After two years of planning, Wharton in 1881 founded the Wharton School of Finance and Economy through a $100,000 initial pledge, making it the first business school established in the United States.[14] ESCP Europe, established in 1819, and a few other business schools were established in Europe prior to Wharton's founding.[15] The school was meant to train future leaders to conduct corporations and public organizations in a rapidly evolving industrial era. Wharton was quoted as saying that the school was meant to "instill a sense of the coming strife [in business life]: of the immense swings upward or downward that await the competent or the incompetent soldier in this modern strife".[13]

From the founding of the school, he defined that its goal was "to provide for young men special means of training and of correct instruction in the knowledge and in the arts of modern Finance and Economy, both public and private, in order that, being well informed and free from delusions upon these important subjects, they may either serve the community skillfully as well as faithfully in offices of trust, or, remaining in private life, may prudently manage their own affairs and aid in maintaining sound financial morality: in short, to establish means for imparting a liberal education in all matters concerning Finance and Economy".[16] The school was renamed the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, in 1902, and formally changed its name to simply, Wharton School, in 1972.[17]

Early on, the Wharton School faculty was tightly connected to an influential group of businessmen, bankers and lawyers that made up the larger Philadelphia School of Political Economy.[18] The faculty incorporated social sciences into the Wharton curriculum, as the field of business was still under development. Albert S. Bolles, a lawyer, served as Wharton's first professor,[19] and the school's Industrial Research Unit was established in 1921.[20]

Wharton professor Simon Kuznets, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, created statistical data on national output, prices, investment, and capital stock, and also measured seasonability, cycles, and secular trends of these phenomena. His work laid out what became the standard procedure for measuring the gross national product and the gross domestic product, and he later led an international effort to establish the same statistical information for all national economies.[21][22] Professor Lawrence Klein, who also won the Nobel Prize in Economics, developed the first econometric model of the U.S. economy, which combined economic theory with mathematics, providing another way to test theories and predict future economic trends.[21]

Wharton professor George W. Taylor is credited with founding the academic field of study known as industrial relations.[23] He served in several capacities in the federal government, most notably as a mediator and arbitrator. During his career, Taylor settled more than 2,000 strikes.[24] In 1967, he helped draft the New York State civil service law that legalized collective bargaining in the state but that also banned strikes by public employees—legislation widely known today as the Taylor Law.[25]

Wharton professor Wroe Alderson (1898–1965) is widely recognized as the most important marketing theorist of the twentieth century[26] and the "father of modern marketing".[27][28] Wharton professor Paul Green is considered to be the "father of conjoint analysis" for his discovery of the statistical tool for quantification of market research.[29]

Wharton professor Solomon S. Huebner is known widely as "the father of insurance education." He originated the concept of "human life value", which became a standard method of calculating insurance value and need. He established the goal of professionalism in the field of insurance, developed the first collegiate level program in insurance and chaired the Department of Insurance at Wharton, and contributed greatly to the progress of adult education in this area.[30] Wharton professor Daniel M. McGill was widely regarded as the "dean of the pension industry",[31] whose research contributed to shaping the modern retirement system both in the public and corporate sectors.[32]

In 1946, after ENIAC was created at Penn, Wharton created the first multidisciplinary programs in technology management with the School of Engineering and Applied Science.[33] Wharton faculty began to work closely with AT&T, Merrill Lynch, MasterCard, Prudential Insurance and the New York Stock Exchange in analyzing the strategic and commercial implications of information systems.[33]

The Wharton School's first business professor was an attorney, Albert Bolles. At the time, there were no other business schools and no business professors could be recruited elsewhere. Bolles, a lawyer by education and training, and business journalist by career, seemed to be the best option for Joseph Wharton. Bolles started his career as a lawyer in Connecticut in the second half of the 19th century. After resigning from his law firm, he started pursuing a new career in business journalism and was promoted to the editor role of Bankers Magazine, a trade publication, in 1880. Upon joining the Wharton School, he began teaching business with classes on the law of governing finance and on the processes of commercial banking. Bolles' instruction in finance was influenced by his previous experience in Bankers Magazine: he stressed conservative business practices, drawing on business history as much as he could. In his classes, inflationist Congressmen were "self-interested debtors". Besides teaching, Bolles advocated for several national reforms, including the uniform banking law. Wharton historian Steven A. Sass wrote about him, "Bolles thus fulfilled Joseph Wharton's pedagogic expectations and…got the new school off to a respectable start by the spring of 1883".[13] In 1884, the first five business students were awarded a Bachelor of Finance degree. One graduate, Shiro Shiba, returned to Japan where he would become a member of the Diet, the Japanese parliament, and another, Robert Adams, Jr., later was named U.S. Ambassador to Brazil.[18]

Classes in business and finance abounded at the Wharton School, but it was lacking in any other areas of business interest. Edmund J. James, with a doctorate from the University of Halle in Germany, reinvigorated the school's curriculum, starting classes on political finance and administration. Later in 1885, James argued for redesigning the course of study at Wharton with elements of German higher education. He wanted to include training in banking, railroading, merchandising, manufacturing and other similar branches, and expand the course's length to four years from the initial three. Joseph Wharton in November 1893 pledged an additional $75,000 to the school in order to implement James' ideas in the school's curriculum. A more comprehensive study plan was then rolled out.[13] Between 1895 and 1915, James started teaching at Wharton the new fields of finance and management as they were developing in the business world. The Wharton School improved its reputation from a bunch of academic "misfits", and some of its alumni rose in the U.S. business world.[34] During this period, the school continued to attract additional faculty members and expand its research programs.[35]

Wharton began awarding MBA degrees in 1921.[34] In 1942, during World War II, in the same fashion of other schools, Wharton's full-time faculty dropped dramatically from 165 to 39 by 1944. According to school historians, members of the faculty were called upon for special posts.[36] In 1959, Wharton adopted the curriculum that is now taught in most major business schools: the program was changed with liberal arts education doubling to almost half of the curriculum, and the social sciences department was moved to the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences in 1975. Since then, Wharton faculty have focused exclusively on business education.

Official historical names of the institution include the Wharton School of Finance and Economy, from 1881 to 1901, and the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, from 1902 to 1971.[37]

On February 26, 2020, Erika H. James was named dean of the Wharton School,[38] effective July 1, 2020. She will be both the first woman and the first African-American to lead the business school.[39]

The Wharton School also operates the Aresty Institute of Executive Education (commonly known as "Wharton Executive Education"), a center for continuing business education for senior executives. The institute is named in honor of civic leader, business owner, philanthropist, and Wharton alumnus Julian Aresty and his brother Joseph Aresty, who together endowed the Aresty Institute for Executive Education in 1987.[62]

Wharton Executive Education offers programs for executives in areas such as finance, marketing, strategy, and innovation. Each year, more than 10,000 professionals from around the world attend Wharton Executive Education programs in classes taught by full-time Wharton faculty.

Wharton offers more than 50 open-enrollment programs for individuals on campuses in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Beijing, China. Wharton also overs three long duration open-enrollment programs that confer alumni status upon successful completion. These programs are the Advanced Finance Program, Advanced Management Program, and the General Management Program.

In addition to a large portfolio of open-enrollment programs for individuals, Wharton Executive Education also offers customized programs for organizations. Custom program topic areas include Finance & Value Creation, Leadership Development, Marketing & Sales, and Strategy & Innovation. Industry areas of expertise include Consumer Products, Retail, Energy, Transportation, Financial Services, Health Care, Pharmaceuticals, Manufacturing & Industrials, Professional Services, Technology & Communications.

Through its online division, Wharton offers massive open online courses on Coursera with specializations in business and financial modeling, business analytics, entrepreneurship, and business foundations.[63] Wharton Online also offers a Leadership and Management Certificate and a Business Analytics Certificate. The division is accredited by the International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET); it was the first online business school to be accredited by this organization.[64]

The Wharton School adheres to grading curves and is known for its competitive culture, its students receiving the highest aggregate competitiveness index score in the Princeton Review's study of 295 business schools in the world.[89] In order to promote a more collaborative atmosphere, the Wharton Graduate Association maintains and annually reaffirms a grade non-disclosure policy, consisting of two main principles.[90] The first is to "refrain from disclosing GPAs, specific class grades, class ranking, or transcripts to potential employers until a full-time position has been offered". The second principle permits and encourages students to disclose general academic honors and distinctions. All employers adhere to this policy throughout the recruitment process at the Wharton School.

The Wharton School has over 100 active student clubs.[91] Wharton students also organize 19 business conferences each year and organize and participate in different business related competitions, like the Penn Wharton Startup Challenge and the Hult Prize at Penn.[92][93]

• List of Ivy League business schools
• List of United States business school rankings
• List of business schools in the United States

• Nicole Ridgway, The Running of the Bulls: Inside the Cutthroat Race from Wharton to Wall Street, Gotham, 2005.
• Steven A. Sass, Pragmatic Imagination: A History of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.
• Emory Richard Johnson, The Wharton School: Its Fifty Years, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1931.

• The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania