By Julie FrenchThe Daily Northwestern
After 38 years without offering an undergraduate program, the Kellogg Graduate School of Management will offer two undergrad certificate programs, with the first starting next fall.
Northwestern administrators are expected to announce the move this morning in a university-wide e-mail newsletter.
University President Henry Bienen told The Daily on Wednesday that the decision to offer the programs – in finance and management – is due in part to interest from students, faculty, university trustees and recruiters of NU students.
“It’s going to be good for Northwestern in just about every way you can think of,” Bienen said. “We thought it was a good educational opportunity that would help our students in the job market.”
The two four-course sequences will accept about 50 students each after applicants take seven prerequisite courses in calculus, probability, economics and statistics.
The financial economics certificate program, offered in conjunction with Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, will begin next fall with classes in corporate finance and investments.
The second program – in managerial analytics – will begin in fall 2008 with courses in finance, pricing and operations strategy. The classes are offered jointly through Kellogg and McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science.
NU had an undergraduate business school until 1969, but it was discontinued to allow Kellogg to focus on building one of the best graduate schools of management in America.
Kellogg has consistently ranked among the top three graduate Masters in Business Administration programs in the country since 1988, when Business Week began evaluating them.
Bienen said the idea for an undergraduate business curriculum came on a trip to India he took with Kellogg’s Dean Dipak Jain in summer 2005.
Research and planning for the programs began when they returned in the fall.
The Undergraduate Budget Priorities Committee recommended last year that the administration consider offering finance courses for undergraduates.
Bienen said the new certificates will complement two already thriving programs in Weinberg – the Mathematical Methods in the Social Sciences major and the Business Institutions Program minor.
“There were an awful lot of good students coming into MMSS and significant numbers coming into the BIP program,” he said. “I was struck by a lot of the interest (in undergraduate business courses) on the student side.”
The business institutions minor had 153 students graduate in 2006, up from 91 in 2004, said BIP’s Assistant Director Lucy Millman. There are 513 declared minors in the program, and she said she expects enrollment to top 600 by the end of the school year.
“It keeps increasing by about 50 students every year, and more and more students actually finish,” Millman said.
The new programs not only will make undergraduates more attractive to employers, but also to top graduate schools, Bienen said.
Twenty-seven percent of students entering Kellogg in 2006 majored in business as undergraduates, while only 18 percent majored in economics. The most popular undergraduate majors for students entering Kellogg were engineering and sciences, at 38 percent.
About 250 seniors graduated with an economics major last year, a major that some students use as a substitute for an undergraduate business major, said Robert Porter, chairman of the economics department.
Many other elite graduate business schools – such as Harvard, Stanford and Columbia universities – don’t offer full undergraduate programs.
But Bienen said schools that do have undergraduate business programs, such as the University of Pennsylvania and Emory University, have an advantage in attracting students.
“A significant number of our trustees thought that we could compete with Wharton (School at University of Pennsylvania),” he said.
Prof. Janice Eberly, the chairwoman of the finance department at Kellogg, said the new programs expand upon what is already offered at the school.
“It complements the brand and extends the brand of the school to a different group of students,” she said.
Eberly said the difference between NU’s new program and the programs at other schools is NU’s continued emphasis on a broad liberal arts education for undergraduates.
“This is potentially a very high-visibility program because we’re looking at very talented students,” she said. “It will really offer something that many other schools are currently not offering.”
Reach Julie French at [email protected].
