125 Years of Ideas, Innovation, and Impact

First Comprehensive Business Curriculum

The University of Chicago established a business school in 1898, but it wasn’t until 1916 that the University changed the school’s name from the College of Commerce and Administration to the School of Commerce and Administration, with a separate budget and the power to grant advanced degrees, first the MA, and later the PhD. That same year, the university joined with more than a dozen other institutions of higher education to form the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business (now AACSB International) to support business education in colleges and universities.

In the early years of graduate education at Booth, leaders pioneered a new way to teach business—one that took a more comprehensive, creative, and professional approach. That concept later evolved into The Chicago Approach™, the educational philosophy that sets Booth apart from every other business school in the world.

First PhD Program in Business

When Leon Carroll Marshall became dean of Chicago Booth in 1909, he aimed to set a higher standard for business education in the United States. Business “falls little short of being as broad, as inclusive, as life itself in its motives, aspirations, and social obligations,” he wrote in 1921. “Training for the task of the business administrator must have breadth and depth comparable with those of the task.” To support those goals, he introduced the nation’s first PhD program in business in 1920. Since then, the program has trained Nobel laureates, educated leading researchers around the world, and revolutionized the way scholars, government leaders, and industry professionals think about and conduct business.

First Academic Business Journal

The first scholarly journal to focus on business-related topics, The Journal of Business of the University of Chicago played a key role in positioning business as a serious academic discipline. Early issues published research on everything from collegiate business education and Canadian labor law to the personal automobile “as an instrument of injury and death.” Published quarterly, the journal was available at an annual subscription price of $4. (Canadian subscribers paid an additional 15 cents in postage.) The journal ceased publication in 2006 after nearly 80 years of breaking new ground on wide-ranging topics such as stock market manipulations, corporate payouts, and debt maturity.

First University to Grant a PhD in Business to a Woman

Ursula Batchelder Stone, PhD ’29, made history when she became the first woman to earn a PhD in business from an American university. A Bryn Mawr graduate, Stone focused her research on consumer economics and wrote her dissertation on the baking industry “with special reference to the bread-making industry in Chicago.” After graduating, she cofounded a consulting firm, fought for women’s rights, helped revitalize Hyde Park, and taught at George Williams College. Today, with this history in mind, Booth continues to advocate for advancing women in business and for gender equity in academia and in the workplace.

First Executive MBA Program

When World War II created a shortage of managers in businesses across the United States, Chicago Booth introduced a new approach to the MBA: educating professionals who had significant work experience. Booth’s Executive MBA Program launched in 1943 with 52 students—accountants, plant supervisors, engineers, production managers, purchasing agents, and even one librarian. Classes met two nights a week in downtown Chicago, allowing students to continue working full time. Today, the Executive MBA Program remains at the forefront of business education, drawing senior executives from across the globe to our campuses in Chicago, London, and Hong Kong.

Booth Students Found National Black MBA Association

The late 1960s was a time of change in the United States, with anti-war demonstrations and protests against racism around the country. Black students pressured elite universities to admit them, and Black professionals worked in major corporations, but even then, their numbers were small. In 1970, to build community and promote inclusion, a group of Black Chicago Booth students put together a two-day conference of their peers comprising nearly 30 MBA programs across the country. The group was incorporated in 1972 and grew into the National Black MBA Association, the leading business organization for Black professionals in the United States. With 20,000 members in 40 chapters nationwide, the NBMBAA today provides scholarships and access to professional opportunities.

First Business School Faculty Member to Win a Nobel Prize

The Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was first awarded in 1968, but it was more than a decade before an economist whose primary appointment was in a business school won the award. George J. Stigler received the 1982 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal studies of industrial structures, the functioning of markets, and the causes and effects of public regulation. One of the great economists of the 20th century, Stigler played a key role in establishing Booth as a world leader in economics research. Although he was the first Booth Nobel laureate, he was far from the last. In the 40 years since Stigler’s award, nine additional Booth faculty members have won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences.

First US Business School with Campuses on Three Continents

When Booth enrolled its inaugural cohort of Executive MBA students in Singapore, it became the only US institution with permanent campuses on three continents. (The school established a presence in Europe in 1994 with the opening of a campus in Barcelona.) Taught by Booth’s own world-renowned faculty, the global locations expanded the reach of a Booth education to business professionals from all over the world. Today, our campuses in Hong Kong and London serve as global hubs for our work in facilitating world-class business education, leadership insights, and partnerships around the world.

Tenth Faculty Nobel Laureate

In 2022, Douglas W. Diamond, the Merton H. Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his pioneering body of work on banks, liquidity, and financial crises. With his award, the number of Nobel laureates who currently teach on Booth’s faculty rose to four.

In 2013, Eugene F. Fama, the Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, and Lars Peter Hansen, the David Rockefeller Distinguished Service Professor in the University of Chicago Departments of Economics and Statistics and at Chicago Booth, were honored for their work in advancing the understanding of asset prices through empirical analysis. Just four years later, in 2017, Richard H. Thaler, the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of Behavioral Science and Economics, won the Nobel for his groundbreaking contributions to behavioral economics, a field that applies insights from psychology to examine how people make economic decisions. With their bold thinking and visionary ideas, these pathbreaking scholars have had a profound impact on their students, the field of economics, and the world.