History of the MBA [MBA Friday Facts]

Did you ever wonder how the MBA started or what the first MBA program was? Well, wonder no more, because our MBA Friday Facts series is back with a brief history of the MBA.

• The world's first collegiate school of business is Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania, created in 1881.

• The first graduate school of management, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, was created in 1900. Creating a graduate school for business was considered a bold move at the time. The first degree Tuck offered was a Master of Science in Commerce.

• The first MBA program was founded eight years later at Harvard Business School in 1908. The first class only had 15 faculty members, 33 regular students and 47 special students.

• The first known African American graduate of Harvard Business School is Wendell Thomas Cunningham, the son of a former slave who graduated in 1915.

• The Shanghai University of Commerce, created in 1921, was the first Chinese business school.

• The case method was created at Harvard Business School in 1924.

• The first Executive MBA program was created at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business in 1943.

• The first business school to offer a program focused on international management was the Thunderbird School of Global Management, created in 1946.

• Harvard Business School began admitting women in 1959. The first female Harvard MBA students were graduates of the Harvard-Radcliffe Program in Business Administration who joined the second year of the Harvard MBA program.

• Canada's Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario was the first school outside of the United States to grant MBA degrees.

• The first European MBA program was created at INSEAD in Fountainebleau France in 1957. In that same year, INSEAD also became the first school to offer a one-year MBA program.

• Chicago Booth became the first business school to establish a minority relations program in 1964.

Did we leave out any major MBA milestones? Please let us know in the comments section below.

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