UC Davis to Offer JD/MBA through UC Hastings: MBA News

UC Hasting’s Morris A. Ratner, who is responsible for coordinating the law school’s JD/MBA program options, outlined the type of students to whom the joint degree may appeal in a press release:

 “For some students – for example, students interested in starting or joining ventures in which they will be called upon both to give legal advice and to make business decisions – a concurrent degree program makes sense. For those students, our arrangement with UC Davis creates wonderful opportunities, and nicely supplements our existing JD/MBA programming options."

As is usually the case with a JD/MBA program, the joint option allows students to reduce the time it would take to pursue the two degrees separately – in this case, from five to four years. The format also requires that students gain admittance to both schools independently.

Following UC Hasting’s announcement, UC Davis explained via social media that taking its new JD/MBA program option would amount to spending five semesters at UC Hastings and five quarters at UC Davis. It also outlined that students would take their MBA core courses at Davis, but could study their MBA electives at the school’s locations in Sacramento and San Ramon, as well as in Davis.

UC Davis rose considerably in QS’s latest regional MBA rankings for North America, jumping 18 places from outside the top 50 and joining the top 40 (or top 30, if we exclude business schools in Canada). 

UC Hastings, meanwhile, was California’s first law school and traces its origins back to the latter part of the nineteenth century. The school’s student body is predominantly made up of JD students (93% of total enrollment in fall 2014, for instance) and boasts a location proximal to San Francisco’s local, state, and federal courts.