Best Colleges for Business Careers

You have two options.

If you’re graduating from high school and looking to pursue a career in business, you have two very good options. You can either apply directly to enroll in an undergraduate business program, or you can pursue a more general liberal arts education but supplement it with courses in economics and summer business internships. In this article, we’ll explore the pros and cons of each approach. But either way, you can pursue a prosperous career in entrepreneurship, finance, banking, management consulting, venture capital, or even work for the government or a nonprofit.

Option #1: Undergraduate business programs.

What are they? Most people know that you can pursue a graduate level degree in business, called an MBA. But many universities also offer a business degree for undergraduates, called a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Economics or sometimes called a Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A). These are typically four year programs for undergraduates who know they want to specialize in business, and want to start getting real-world experience right away.

How common are they?

Many universities offer undergraduate business programs, but perhaps the majority of schools do not. Out of the eight colleges in the Ivy League, for example, only two of them have undergraduate business programs: UPenn and Cornell. The other six universities in the Ivy League (Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Columbia, Brown, Princeton) have no specific business program. You can study economics there, and statistics, and a variety of other business-related disciplines, but you can’t earn an undergraduate business degree.

The pros…

The first pro of an undergraduate business program is that you get to focus your time and energy on business coursework. If you opted instead to get a liberal arts degree, you’d likely have to take a lot of “core requirements” in courses such as English, science, foreign languages, etc. But in undergraduate business programs, you don’t have as many (or sometimes any) of these requirements.

So the second pro is that you get to specialize in a particular area of business that interests you, such as: marketing, information systems, management, real estate, entrepreneurship, international business, etc. You have the time in your academic schedule to really delve deep into one of these key areas through courses, research, extracurriculars, and internships.

The final pro is that your business education is much more practical and hands-on than you would get at a liberal arts college. While students at liberal arts colleges study economics and statistics and data science, this is mostly theoretical study from a textbook. But in an undergraduate business program, you actually launch your own start-ups, consult for local companies, engage in pitch wars, analyze real-world case studies, etc. You basically do everything you’d do in an MBA program.

The cons…

The problem with undergraduate business programs is that they’re typically more difficult to get into. For example, the #6-ranked program in the nation, the McCombs School of Business at UT Austin, only has a 14% acceptance rate, whereas the acceptance rate to the College of Liberal Arts is 21%. NYU’s College of Arts of Science has an Early Decision acceptance rate of 38%, but only a 9% acceptance rate for their Stern business program.

The other con is that in order to get accepted into an undergraduate business program, you need to have some good evidence of business and/or leadership success on your high school resume, in addition to strong math scores across the board. You will be competing against candidates who launched their own businesses in high school, or founded a successful nonprofit, or otherwise have demonstrated proficiency in some key area of business. If you have no experience whatsoever, it will be very difficult to get in.

Two different application methods.

It’s worth noting that there are two different ways to apply to these programs. Some of them are “direct admit,” which means you apply directly out of high school, such as: UPenn (Wharton), UMich (Ross), NYU (Stern), Carnegie Mellon (Tepper), Cornell (Johnson) and UT Austin (McCombs). But others are “delayed admission,” which means you first have to apply to the school through general admission, and take a year or two of prerequisite courses on campus before you can apply to enroll in their business program, such as: MIT (Sloan), UVA (McIntire), and Emory (Goizueta).

The benefit of direct admit programs is that you know for sure whether or not you got into a program; with delayed admission, you may find yourself stuck at a school being forced to study something other than business, because you weren’t accepted into the program. (The acceptance rate for delayed admission programs varies by school.) The benefit of delayed admission programs is that the admission committee pays much more attention to your business achievements in college, so you don’t have to have any experience whatsoever on your high school resume.

The Top 10 Undergraduate Business Programs…

According to US News and World Report, here are the Top 10 undergraduate business programs for 2024 and their acceptance rates: #1 UPenn (Wharton, 6%), #2 MIT (Sloan, 4%), #3 UC Berkeley (Haas, 9%), #4 Univ. Michigan (Ross, 20%), #5 NYU (Stern, 9%), #6 UT Austin (McCombs, 14%), #7 Carnegie Mellon (Tepper, 9%), #8 Cornell (Johnson, 5%), #9 Indiana Univ. (Kelley, 38%), #10 UNC (Kenan-Flagler, 12%).

Here are the next ten best programs: #11 USC (Marshall, 9%), #12 UVA (McIntire, 12%), #13 Emory (Goizueta, 16%), #14 Georgetown (McDonough, 13%), #15 Notre Dame (Mendoza, 14%), #16 Washington Univ. St. Louis (Olin, 9%), #17 Ohio State (Fisher), #18 UIUC (Gies, 27%), #19 Univ. Washington (21%), #20 Univ. Wisconsin (24%). And there are many more good ones to choose from.

Out of the Top 10 programs, Indiana University (Kelley) is by far the easiest to get into. If you apply directly out of high school, it has a 38% acceptance rate. And if you apply to enroll in the program after spending a year on campus as an Indiana Univ. student, you’re automatically admitted if you’ve maintained at least a “B” average in your pre-business courses.

Option #2: Liberal Arts Degree

Instead of applying to an undergraduate business program, you can simply enroll in a high-quality liberal arts college, major in whatever field you want, but supplement your education with economics, math and statistics courses and strategic business summer internships. While you won’t get the same kind of in-depth, hands-on business experience, you can carve out a niche for yourself as someone with an interesting and valuable cross-section of skills and experience.

For example, you might major in computer science, with extracurriculars in app development, which would certainly make you appealing to tech companies looking for new executives. Or you might major in Asian Studies, become fluent in Mandarin, and spend a term abroad in Shanghai, which would make you appealing for companies looking to expand into China, or who have strategic partnerships in Asia. The business world is very competitive, so any special skill sets you offer can help you stand out.

The Best Liberal Arts Colleges for a Career in Business…

There’s no “best” liberal arts school to prepare you for a career in business, but studies show that the more prestigious your undergraduate college is, the more lucrative your business career will be. Obviously, top companies and MBA programs value high-achieving students who graduate from highly competitive universities. So if you’re looking to set yourself up for success, try getting into one of the most competitive colleges you can.

For example, the Burning Glass Institute (a nonprofit that studies employment trends) found that graduates of these top colleges had the highest-paying jobs in finance ten years after graduation: #1 MIT (4% acceptance rate), #2 Harvard (4%), #3 Princeton (4%), #4 UPenn (3%), #5 Dartmouth (6%), #6 Yale (4%), #7 Columbia (6%), #8 Duke (6%), #9 Middlebury (6%), #10 UChicago (6%). It’s no wonder that these schools made the list; it reads like a “Who’s Who” of top American colleges.

The list continues: #11 Stanford (4%), #12 Bowdoin (7%), #13 Georgetown (13%), #14 Swarthmore (6%), #15 Cornell (5%), #16 NYU (13%), #17 Williams (7%), #18 Wellesley (7%), #19 Johns Hopkins (5%), #20 Northwestern (7%). Again, top companies value smart, high-achieving students with a proven track record of academic scholarship and extracurricular achievement, which is exactly what these colleges look for in high school applicants.