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Graduate Business Schools

Business school is often attractive to students who want to get an "interesting" job but do not want to be lawyers. For such students business school is often a better bet. It takes two rather than three years, it is a little easier to get into a good one (being female helps in business school admissions; law schools admissions are mostly sex-blind), and there are still jobs for new MBA graduates (although for several years there have been rumblings that this market also will be saturated). The jobs are not limited to corporations either; American business schools claim to teach management, the coordination of people and resources to accomplish a given goal, which is what all large organizations try to do. As a result, government and even non-profit institutions are hiring business school graduates for jobs which, twenty years ago, would probably have gone to lawyers. Most people now assume that MBA graduates, like lawyers, are intelligent, and as a bonus they may even have some useful skills.

Unlike law schools, most business schools have a separate department called International Business; however, these departments are not usually highly regarded within their own schools, in part because they do not rely heavily on econometrics and are therefore thought to be "soft." Moreover, there are very few jobs for new MBAs with International Business majors. As explained above, very few young Americans are now sent abroad by corporations. Therefore students must get hired by the corporation for their substantive skills and later try to develop a special interest in the international side of things. The recommended strategy is to take a double major in a substantive area (marketing, finance, management, etc.) and International Business.

Among the "regular" business schools, the best by reputation are Harvard and Stanford; New York University has been cited as the best in international business, and Yale's School of Organization and Management is an interesting attempt to combine training in business and public affairs.  There are also a couple of programs especially geared to students interested in international business. The American Graduate School of International Business, just outside of Phoenix, more familiarly known as Thunderbird, is the only major business school in the country not affiliated with a university, and it has developed an impressive reputation for training high quality personnel in international business. The University of South Carolina business school has developed a program which requires a foreign business internship. Both of these programs stress language competence. Their reputation also attracts recruiters looking for people with these sorts of interests. They offer a Masters degree, which is not an MBA, which is usually a drawback. Outside of these programs, an advanced business degree that is not an MBA is not worth much.

For many undergraduates, the major drawback of graduate business school is its heavy reliance on economics and mathematics. Anyone interested in business school should take microeconomics and macroeconomics (the order does not matter) and several advanced economics courses to see how well they do and whether or not they are comfortable with that mode of analysis. An economics major is not necessary for graduate business school, and an undergraduate business degree is usually not recommended. Note that graduate business schools have their own standardized test, the Graduate Management Admissions Test.