Wharton School
Wharton School
Main page

Wharton School

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Wharton School

The Wharton School (/ˈhwɔːrtən/ WHOR-tən) is the business school of the University of Pennsylvania, a private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia. Established in 1881 through a donation from Joseph Wharton, a co-founder of Bethlehem Steel, the Wharton School is the world's oldest collegiate business school. It is one of six Ivy League business schools, and is the business school which has produced the highest number of billionaires in America, including Warren Buffett, Elon Musk, and U.S. President Donald Trump.

The Wharton School awards undergraduate and graduate degrees with a school-specific economics major and concentrations in over 18 disciplines in Wharton's academic departments. The undergraduate degree is a general business degree focused on core business skills. At the graduate level, the Master of Business Administration program can be pursued by itself or along with dual studies leading to a joint degree from its law, engineering, and government schools.

In addition to its tracks in accounting, finance, operations, statistics, and other academic departments, the doctoral and post-doctoral programs co-sponsor several diploma programs in conjunction with other schools within the university.

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.

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. ESCP Europe, established in 1819, and a few other business schools were established in Europe prior to Wharton's founding 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."

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." The school was renamed the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, in 1902, and formally changed its name to simply Wharton School in 1972.

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. 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, and the school's Industrial Research Unit was established in 1921.

Wharton professor Simon Kuznets, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, created statistical data on national output, prices, investment, and capital stock and 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. 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.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.