MBA celebrates centenary

[photopress:Class_of_1910..jpg,full,alignright]The master’s in business administration (MBA) degree turned 100 years old this week.

On April 8 1908, the Corporation of Harvard University voted to establish a business school.

Eight of the original 33 MBA students finished the two-year course to start a tradition that has spread around the world and produced Nobel prize winners, at least one national president and hundreds of senior executives and quite an enormous amount of imitation. This picture is of the class of 1910.

According to the Harvard Business School, members of this year’s MBA class come from nearly 70 countries.

According to Bloomberg data, more than 500 Harvard Business School alumni — who, according to a 2006 survey, command the highest starting salaries among US business school attendees — now serve as chief executives of major corporations around the world.

[photopress:MBA_HBS_Shanghai_Club.jpg,full,alignleft]New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News’ parent, is a Harvard Business School alumnus, as is US President George W Bush (mark you there are many who would regard that as not much to boast about.)

So is Enron ex-chief executive Jeffrey Skilling, a Harvard alumnus of 1979 who graduated in the top 5% of his class, who is now serving a 24-year jail term for fraud. (There are many, including this writer, who believe that fraud could not have been involved if the figures were published. And they were. It was just that financial analysts could not cope with the flood.)

Another distinguished and fallen alumni is former Merrill Lynch head Stan O’Neal who was fired last October after it emerged that he did not know about the mortgage risks that led to the biggest write-downs in the company’s history.

According to the Financial Times, about 500,000 MBA students will graduate this year, with 30,000 from China alone.

We are told by Harvard that former Scholars and other HBS Alumni in Shanghai formed the HBS Alumni Club of Shanghai in June 2002. This may well be true but the photograph suggests a much earlier period. A minor mystery.
Source: Business Report