How to Get Admission to Ivy League Business Schools

So, you want to study business in the Ivy League? If you want to major in business at an Ivy League university, you may need to broaden your horizons.

First, a Bit of History

The Ivy League universities are among the oldest in the country. Five of the eight are among the 10 oldest universities in the country:

Harvard – 1636
Yale – 1702
Penn – 1740
Princeton – 1746
Columbia – 1754

Brown and Dartmouth were founded a little bit later (in 1746 and 1769, respectively). Cornell is the outlier: it was started in 1846–almost a century and a half after Harvard. As we shall see, this is part of the reason that Cornell looks so very, very different from the other schools with which it plays football.

And that’s the key here: the “Ivy League” is a relatively recent creation. Eight schools got together and created a sports league. So the “league” in Ivy League has nothing to do with academics whatsoever. Like so much in America’s university system, sports is sort of the tail that wags the dog.

The Liberal Arts Focus of the Ivy League

The traditional curricular focus of all the Ivy League schools harkens back to the traditional academic subjects that people like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin studied: philosophy, law, and theology. At the time, of course, “science” was more or less an outgrowth of philosophy, or the inquiry into knowledge. The same was true of mathematics: it was all sort of rolled into the study of the current state of mankind’s knowledge of the world.

So, it wasn’t until the 19th century that Europeans and Americans began thinking of teaching university courses that were directly relevant to both agriculture (where most Americans were employed at the time) and to the advances of the Industrial Age (and the rise of engineering as a discipline). Cornell, for example, still has a solid agricultural program, as well as a veterinary school. A large part of Cornell’s mission was (and still is, to an extent) to improve the agricultural yield of our farmers. (This was true of all the so-called “land grant” universities).

A Professional Focus is Relatively New

So it wasn’t until much later in our history that universities began teaching subjects that were directly related to the economic development of the country and to the professional development of individuals. Prior to this, education at Ivy League schools was limited to the economic and political elites. Then, the subjects taught were considered most relevant to being an “educated person.” Graduates of the Ivies might very well go on to take their place (by birthright, mostly) in the upper-class establishment of American society.

Business: Today’s Educational Imperative?

Fast forward to today. The educational priorities of the American public have shifted. There are a lot of reasons for the shift.

The college has become so expensive–especially at Ivy League institutions–that families are more conscious of the “return on investment”: what will be the short and long-term economic payoff of earning this degree?
A continuing national philosophy that is best expressed by the words of Calvin Coolidge: “The business of America is business.”
Majors like history, English, and philosophy are now considered “useless” by most Americans. In other words, even elites are looking askance at the idea that these disciplines can train the mind, improve one’s ability to think analytically and to tap into a knowledge of history and culture as a way to guide humanity forward.
Americans have an increasing skepticism about knowledge and elitism in general (even though the majority of our presidents and many of our political leaders are graduates of Ivy League institutions).

Today, the most popular and common major in American universities is business. Over half of Americans graduate with a business degree of some sort.

Check out this short video about studying business in the Ivy League.

Can You Study Business in the Ivy League?

The short answer is yes if you go to one of two of the eight Ivy League schools.

Dartmouth, Brown, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia do not offer business majors to undergraduates. Of course, some of these do offer graduate degrees in business (Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia). But 6 of the 8 Ivies do not offer undergraduate majors in business. However, two, do offer business for undergrads: Penn and Cornell.

Study Business in the Ivy League at the University of Pennsylvania

The Wharton School of Business at Penn offers degrees in business. Interested students submit an application direction to Wharton. While there are some joint programs that link liberal arts majors with business, there is not a lot of intellectual or curricular cross-over between Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Wharton School.

Along with that, it’s also important to note that Penn also has a School of Nursing and a School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

The Wharton School Concentrations

Accounting
Behavioral Economics
Business Economics and Public Policy
Business Analytics
Environmental Management and Policy
Finance
Health Care Management and Policy
Legal Studies and Business Ethics
Management (with concentrations in Entrepreneurship & Innovation, Multinational Management, Organizational Effectiveness, and Strategic Management)
Marketing
Marketing and Communications
Operations, Information, and Decisions (with concentrations in Decision Processes, Informational Systems, and Operations Management/Management Science)
Marketing and Operations Management
Real Estate
Statistics

Secondary Concentrations at Wharton

Each concentration above requires only four courses, so it’s easy to switch around or pursue more than one. Wharton also offers some “secondary concentrations,” meaning that a student chooses a main concentration above, and then can add one of the following areas to it:

Global Analysis
Managing Electronic Commerce
Retailing
Social Impact and Responsibility

Clearly, Penn has a wide range of business offerings, which makes it even more attractive to students who want to get study business in the Ivy League.

Study business in the Ivy League at Cornell

Cornell is the other school at which you can study business in the Ivy League. Cornell now has the SC Johnson College of Business, which is a unification of two other programs at Cornell (the video above was created before this union had been consummated).

The Dyson School

The first program is the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, which offers (naturally enough) a BS in Applied Economics and Management. And true to Cornell’s historical mission to serve the agricultural needs of the state of New York, the Dyson School is housed in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS). Despite its history and anomalous institutional structure, the curriculum at Dyson mirrors more or less what one would find at any college of business for undergrad. The core requirements are supplemented by at least one concentration.

The other alternative for studying business at Cornell is to zero in on a particular business–one in which Cornell has particular strength: hotel administration. Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration offers a BS in Hotel Administration. The degree requires a focus in one of three areas: Finance, Accounting and Real Estate (FARE), Hospitality Leadership (HOLD), or Services Marketing and Operations Management (SMOM).

Study Business in the Ivy League: Some Alternatives

If you decide not to attend either Penn’s Wharton School or Cornell’s Johnson School, then how else might you study business in the Ivy League? Here are some ideas.

Study economics

Perhaps the best alternative–academically speaking–if you want to study something somewhat related to business, then you could take up the “dismal science” of economics. In fact, a larger and larger proportion of Ivy League students are studying economics these days. I’m not saying that this is a positive development, but economics is definitely where the demand is these days.

Join business-oriented clubs and societies

Most of the Ivy League colleges have a variety of business-oriented activities on campus, from incubators for entrepreneurs to investment and finance clubs, to marketing and communications. Look for these on the student activities pages of the college’s website.

Become a leader in any club or association

Becoming a business leader is about exercising leadership in a particular context. But leadership is something one can learn in a variety of contexts. So don’t pass up an opportunity to develop that leadership in any way you can. Whether you lead groups of students in sports, the arts, community service, religious organizations, or any other sort of club or association, you will be cultivating the sort of skills and habits that can make you a leader in the business world. And most clubs will need certain kinds of abilities, including accounting and management. So if you are particularly excited about those activities, step up and lead!

Is Business A Good Major?

Majoring in business…should you or shouldn’t you?

First, let’s face it: everyone works in a business. Lawyers are in business. Doctors and dentists are in business. Along with college counselors are in business. Non-profits should act like businesses in order to expand and grow. Even higher education has become a business. The overwhelming majority of Americans work in some sort of business.

Business is by far the most popular major because it seems to have a “real-world” application. It provides helpful information about the world of business. It introduces students to the functions that businesses must have in order to survive: a good strategy, good management, solid accounting, effective marketing and sales strategies, well-crafted human resource functions, and the like. One could also learn about particular kinds of businesses: health care, the music industry, real estate, hotel and restaurants, and more.

A Business Major Is Not Enough

A good business major could be very good preparation for the world of work. But the major–by itself–is probably not enough to get a student a high-paying job. However, completing a college degree of any kind is a signal to future employers that the student has the staying power, the dedication, the commitment, to see a complex, multiyear project to its conclusion.

Book Learning vs. On-the-Job Training

But is the book learning one does in an undergraduate fully prepare a young person to make significant contributions to an enterprise? Probably not. The reason is that most of what one needs to be successful in a job is learned on the job. So if the business student is amplifying their classroom learning with internships and other real-world business experience (like maybe running a successful lawn mowing business, or being promoted to manager of an In-and-Out burger joint), then the classroom experience is not going to be enough to help the student walk into a high-paying, high-responsibility job. That college graduate is still going to have to start at the bottom rung of the professional ladder.

Also, it’s important to recognize that majoring in business is not necessarily the ticket to riches any more than a degree in, say, political science, French literature, or Japanese language might be.

Data That Indicate the Wisdom of Majoring in Business–or Not

The website Payscale.com ranks majors according to their earning potential–on average. They gather a lot of data from real people who pursued particular majors and ask about their salaries. Obviously one’s earnings right out of college will be different from earnings 10 years later…so Payscale.com tracks this.

I have pulled some data from Payscale to illustrate the assumption that a business major is going to make a graduate a ton of money. As it happens some business majors rank very poorly, while others are (on average!) better drivers of high salaries.

What’s also surprising is that some liberal arts majors actually are pretty good (on average!) in preparing a student to make a decent salary. What is not so surprising is that engineering is among the best majors in terms of future earnings (however, it’s a really tough major and a very small proportion of students will graduate with an engineering degree).

Here are some selected results from Payscale.com.

RANK	Major	Early career pay	Mid-career pay
1	Petroleum Engineering	$94,500	$176,900
3	Applied Economics and Management	$58,900	$140,000
5	Political Economy	$57,600	$136,200
8	Business Analysis	$57,200	$133,200
11	Econometrics	$60,100	$131,000
12	Public Accounting	$56,400	$130,800
19	Chemical Engineering	$72,800	$127,200
36	Foreign Affairs	$49,900	$119,100
38	Jazz Studies	$46,300	$119,000
39	Computational & Applied Mathematics	$66,600	$118,700
46	Bioscience	$47,900	$117,800
60	Computer Science (CS)	$68,600	$114,700
67	Physics	$60,700	$113,100
84	International Business & Finance	$58,400	$109,800
92	Entrepreneurship & Marketing	$46,800	$108,500
96	Economics	$56,700	$107,800
97	Japanese Language	$48,200	$107,500
112	Mathematics & Statistics	$58,200	$106,100
138	Government	$50,100	$102,100
151	Asian Studies	$42,900	$100,500
168	Business Information Systems	$58,800	$98,700
169	Finance	$55,600	$98,600
174	Chinese Language	$50,600	$97,900
180	Business Finance	$53,900	$97,500
186	International Business	$50,800	$96,900
196	Real Estate	$54,400	$95,800
201	German Studies	$48,200	$94,900
224	Music Production & Engineering	$42,200	$93,500
236	Business & Marketing	$47,000	$92,100
280	Marketing	$48,300	$89,700
308	Accounting	$51,000	$88,000
310	Philosophy	$47,000	$87,900
316	Management & Finance	$51,400	$87,400
316	Management & Finance	$51,400	$87,400
364	General Business	$47,300	$83,800
403	Business Administration	$48,500	$80,600
405	Forensic Science	$43,200	$80,500
692	Business & Healthcare Management	$44,000	$63,300

The upshot is that one’s major is not the only–or even the most important–variable determining one’s professional and economic success in life. Many other variables also play a role.

Since this is a post about studying business in the Ivy League, it might be helpful to compare stats about majors with stats about particular schools attended. Perhaps one’s economic success is even more dependent on where one attended school.

More from PayScale.com

Again drawing data from Payscale.com, we can pull early and mid-career salaries from a variety of different colleges and universities. These are aggregate data for all graduates of a particular college–including business majors (if that major exists…and as we have noted, only 2 of the 8 Ivy institutions offer business) and STEM majors. Because many STEM majors (particularly engineers and applied mathematicians) make quite a lot of money, on average, Payscale.com helpfully indicates the percentage of STEM majors graduating from each school. (For ease of comparison, I generally did not include STEM-oriented schools like MIT, Georgia Tech, CalTech, and the rest; I did leave Harvey Mudd on the list, however, as I think it’s interesting that the #1 highest earning potential exists at a STEM-oriented liberal arts college).

	University / College	Type	Early Career	Mid-Career	% STEM Degrees
1	Harvey Mudd College	Engineering, Liberal Arts School, Private School	$88,800	$158,200	85%
6	Harvard University	Ivy League, Private School, Research University	$74,800	$146,800	19%
7	Stanford University	Engineering, Private School, Research University	$79,000	$145,200	51%
15	Princeton University	Ivy League, Private School, Research University	$75,200	$139,400	48%
16	Yale University	Ivy League, Private School, Research University	$70,300	$138,300	22%
22	Santa Clara University	Private School, Religious	$69,900	$134,700	29%
25	University of Pennsylvania	Ivy League, Private School, Research University	$72,800	$133,900	21%
29	University of California-Berkeley	Research University, State School	$70,700	$131,800	36%
30	Dartmouth College	Ivy League, Private School, Research University	$71,500	$130,900	35%
31	Colgate University	Liberal Arts School, Private School	$68,400	$130,600	26%
36	Cornell University	Ivy League, Private School, Research University	$70,100	$128,200	43%
37	Brown University	Ivy League, Private School, Research University	$68,200	$127,600	43%
38	Williams College	Liberal Arts School, Private School	$67,500	$127,500	32%
39	Columbia University in the City of New York	Ivy League, Private School, Research University	$71,400	$126,800	30%
54	University of Southern California	Private School, Research University	$64,500	$120,600	23%
67	New York University	Private School, Research University	$63,100	$117,700	18%
77	Amherst College	Liberal Arts School, Private School	$63,800	$116,500	32%
83	Texas A & M University-College Station	Research University, State School	$60,600	$115,700	30%
95	University of Chicago	Private School, Research University	$64,000	$114,200	22%
112	University of Michigan-Ann Arbor	Research University, State School	$63,500	$112,200	38%
113	Bowdoin College	Liberal Arts School, Private School	$61,300	$112,000	37%
128	Middlebury College	Liberal Arts School, Private School	$60,400	$109,800	19%
169	Texas Tech University	Research University, State School	$56,800	$106,500	22%
177	Occidental College	Liberal Arts School, Private School	$56,300	$105,700	25%
194	Oregon State University	Research University, State School	$56,200	$104,800	34%
209	Kenyon College	Liberal Arts School, Private School	$55,000	$103,800	17%
223	University of Massachusetts-Amherst	Research University, State School	$57,400	$103,000	24%
225	Trinity University	Private School, Religious	$54,900	$102,900	27%
242	St Olaf College	Liberal Arts School, Private School, Religious	$54,100	$101,900	30%
244	Rutgers University-Newark	Research University, State School	$57,900	$101,800	11%
255	University of Puget Sound	Liberal Arts School, Private School	$54,200	$101,300	21%

What Do These Data Mean?

What can we take from this selective presentation of the data? First, many liberal arts colleges without business majors (e.g., Colgate, Williams) fare pretty well in comparison to their university counterparts.

Second, the percentage of STEM majors at a university can skew their entire averages: Stanford confers over half of its degrees to STEM majors.

Third, keep in mind that while STEM majors are broken out of the data, business majors are not. Some of the schools on this list (like NYU) have a significant number of business majors, while others (like Harvard) have none.

Fourth, graduates of some schools (like Santa Clara University) have a surprisingly high average salary ranking–higher than many of the Ivies.

Finally, one can say–based on these numbers–that going to an Ivy League college is better (on average!) than going to the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. But does the college one attend really matter? That’s a big question…and beyond the scope of this article.

Why you should not major in business

Jeffrey Selingo is a long-time observer of higher education. His op-ed in The Washington Post, entitled “Business is the most popular college major, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good choice,” brings up some good points. The piece is drawn from his book, There is Life After College–which I highly recommend. Selingo talks at length about these points in his article, but I wanted to bring up a few of them here as well.

Keep in mind that virtually everyone works in some form of business, one way or another. Even those who majored in gender studies or art history are making money in some sort of business venture. Even if you don’t want to major in business, just remember this fundamental truth: everything is business.
Selingo pointed out that “not all business majors are created equal in the job market;” that is, there are some fields under the umbrella of “business majors” that are viewed more favorably than others. Math-focused business majors like accounting and finance may be “better” than degrees in marketing or general business.
The best advice is to choose a major based on what will constantly challenge you.
Adults often say that students should choose a major based on what they’re passionate about. But it’s difficult to know when you’re starting college what you will truly be passionate about for the rest of your life.

More Reasons Not to Major in Business

Consider majors in which you will get the best grades. If you’re thinking about graduate school, your college GPA will be a factor.
Skill development, not your college major, has the largest impact on your potential future salary. While your major is one way to build skills, you might consider other ways to build skills employers want. For example, all employers want people who can write well, work well in teams, and give outstanding presentations. So, for example, business majors may want to take some literature or history courses to hone their writing skills. Similarly, English or history majors may want to take courses in economics, entrepreneurism, marketing, or accounting. Leading a team or a club or other activity might also be important to demonstrate that you have the team-building and leadership skills essential to do the job.
The college one attends can have as much importance —or more—in one’s future employability and salary potential. Keep in mind that 75% of Ivy League schools, for example, do not offer undergraduate business majors. But plenty of their alumni are leaders in the business community.

Should You Study Business in the Ivy League–Or Anywhere Else?

The answer to this question begins with the reminder that only two of the eight Ivies offer business. So in some sense “Ivy League” and “business” don’t really mix. But how about if we broaden the question–should you study business anywhere?

The answer is not clear from the evidence and data. It all depends. It depends on your conception of what college is all about. Is it supposed to be a practical training ground for a career, or is it more about training your brain and getting a broad understanding of the world? Your decision to major in business may depend on your interests, too: if you have no interest in more theoretical, academic subjects, then a more concrete, practical degree may be best.

It All Depends…

But there are no certainties here. A business major–by itself–will not make you more money than that philosophy major across the dormitory hall from you. Similarly, going to an Ivy League school will not necessarily make you more money than if you went to a liberal arts college or a state school. Averages like the ones in the tables above can only tell us so much. They are not indicative of your potential success. They should not determine your interests and they definitely do not reflect your aptitudes or abilities.

As you decide what to major in, think about what keeps you engaged, what interests, you, and where your abilities are the strongest. Also remember that no matter what field you go into in today’s economy, you will be “in business.” At some point, you’ll probably have to learn some of the fundamentals of business. Maybe you’ll learn them in college. Maybe you’ll even learn them in the Ivy League. Or somewhere else.

But to put it in Yoda speak, “learn you will.”

Check out this short video about how to choose a college major.