Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business

History

The Katz School tracings its beginnings to the introduction of business education to the university in 1907 as the Evening School of Economics, Accounts, and Finance. Classes met in the Fulton Building on Sixth Street in Pittsburgh. Three years later in 1910, the School of Economics (named for the London School of Economics) was formally set up on Pitt's Oakland campus. In 1916, the school became one of the 17 founding members of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

By 1923 the school was renamed again, this time as the School of Business Administration. In 1949, it became only the third school in the United States to offer executive management training programs. The Graduate School of Business came into existence in 1960 out of a merger with the School of Business Administration and Graduate School of Retailing. Marshall A. Robinson was assigned as dean of the new school, which discontinued the issuance of undergraduate degrees and had an MBA class of 25 students its first year. That same year, the school launched its first doctoral program as well.

In 1963, the school began offering a one-year MBA program, making it the first in the United States to offer the accelerated program. It was one of the first business schools to offer an MBA and Master of Information Systems dual degree. For much of the 1960s, business classes were held in the Cathedral of Learning and Bruce Hall. In 1972, Lou Mervis and wife Myra established a trust fund for Pitt's Graduate School of Business with a $2 million donation ($11.5 million in 2017 dollars). In their honor, the building now known as Thackeray Hall was named after them and dedicated as home of the business school. In 1983, a new building was built to house the business school, and the name was carried over to it.

In 1987, the business school was renamed after Joseph Katz, Pitt alumnus and founder of Papercraft Corporation, following his $10 million donation ($21.1 million in 2017 dollars) to the university. In the 1990s Katz became the first US institution to offer an MBA in Central Europe, and in 2002 launched a bioengineering dual-degree program. The Katz Graduate School of Business now oversees the administration of the undergraduate College of Business Administration.

In 2015, Arjang A. Assad was named the dean of Katz

Campus

Katz is housed in Mervis Hall, which was built in 1983 and is located on the Oakland campus. The facilities include a $2.3 million, 3,000-square foot Financial Analysis Laboratory, featuring a trading room, and a ticker for a realistic Wall Street trading room environment, a business library, a student kitchen, and Bottom Line Bistro coffee shop and cafe.

Katz's Center for Executive Education and Executive MBA Worldwide program is housed in Mellon Financial Corporation Hall which contains classrooms, laboratories, and meeting space, and is located on the fifth floor of Alumni Hall.

MBA programs

The Katz Graduate School of Business offers several options to obtain an MBA including a traditional two-year MBA programs, an accelerated one-year MBA program, a part-time MBA program, joint degree MBA programs with various other schools within the university, and an Executive MBA program.

Traditional two-year MBA

Katz two-year students start in August and graduate 20 months later in April. Entrance statistics for the Full-Time Incoming Class of 2014 included 82 students with a 3.34 average grade point average, a 625 average GMAT score, and 3.8 years of work experience.

The MBA curriculum is divided into two types of courses: Core courses and elective courses. Core courses are required of all MBA students and are intended to provide students with the breadth of knowledge to build a solid business foundation. Full-time MBA students are required to take 27 credits of core courses encompassing Finance, Accounting, Economics, Statistics, Decision Technology, Organizational Behavior, Marketing, Strategy, and Information Systems. Elective courses which total 30 credits are intended to provide depth in a particular concentration. MBA students typically choose one or two concentrations and then choose electives within those concentrations.

Katz concentrations:

The Katz Graduate School’s program features an Experience-Based Learning curriculum that allows student to work on various projects ranging from consulting and fellowship experiences to team-based business competition projects. Examples of these experiences include the Kenneth Woodcock Fellows in which students work with not-for-profits, the Randall Family Big Ideas Competition, and the Consulting Field Projects during which students have worked with such participating companies as Westinghouse Electric Company, Siemens, Philips, and PNC Financial Services.

Katz also offers ten MBA certificates which are designed to allow students to enhance the core curriculucm according to their career goals: Global Supply Chain Management; Technology, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship; Organizational Leadership; Global Management; Corporate Valuation; Corporate Financial Management; Investments and Trading; Project Management; Digital Marketing; and Business Analytics. Katz is a partner of the CFA Institute. As a partner school, the finance curriculum covers 70% of the topics on the CFA exam. Katz also offers scholarships that fund students’ costs for pursuing a CFA.

For the Class of 2014, 96 percent of Katz graduates found employment within three months of graduation earning an average salary of $80,096.

Non-traditional and joint degree programs

The Katz Graduate School was the first school to offer a one-year MBA program in the United States when it instituted the program in 1963. The program begins in August and finishes the following July, covering the same ground that a traditional MBA program covers in two years. For flexibility, Katz offers electives in the day and evening, as well as some Saturday courses. The one-year program is designed primarily for people with strong academic backgrounds in economics or business and substantial work experience. Program requirements include a minimum of 51 credits of approved graduate work, an appropriate distribution of required core courses and elective courses, and a minimum cumulative quality point average of 3.0.

The Katz part-time MBA program is intended for working professionals. The program takes about three years to complete with students taking classes around work hours. Classes are scheduled Monday through Thursday 6:20 to 9:20 p.m. and occasionally on Saturday from 9:00 to 11:45 a.m. Program requirements include a minimum of 51 credits of approved graduate work, an appropriate distribution of required core courses and elective courses, and a minimum cumulative quality point average of 3.0. Entrance statistics for the Incoming Class of 2014 included 169 students with a 3.24 average grade point average, a 555 average GMAT score, and 4.3 years of work experience.

Katz offers an Executive MBA that typically takes two years to complete and may be completed at one of many different extension facilities—in North America (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), South America (São Paulo, Brazil), and Europe (Prague, Czech Republic). Students take most of their courses at the site most convenient to them; however, they also participate in three week long immersion sessions, called Global Executive Forums, with their EMBA Worldwide classmates at other sites. Katz Executive MBA Worldwide program and Center for Executive Education is headquartered in Mellon Financial Corporation Hall on the fifth floor of the university's Alumni Hall.

Rankings

For 2015, national rankings of Katz' MBA program include #35 by Forbes, #35 by Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and #48 by U.S. News and World Report. In global rankings for 2014, Katz was ranked #80 by Financial Times and #76 by The Economist.

MAcc program

The Master of Science in Accounting (MAcc) program is a full-time, 30-credit professional graduate degree program that also prepares students to take the Certified Public Accountant (CPA) exam. Students with an undergraduate accounting degree, will be able to broaden their skills by also taking graduate courses outside accounting and complete the program in two terms. Students with limited background in accounting who are looking to change careers can take prerequisite courses as part of the program, which typically can be completed in four terms or fewer.

Doctoral program

Katz offers a doctoral program that prepares students to become research-oriented faculty members. Doctoral students can focus in seven areas of study: Accounting; Business Analytics and Operations; Information Systems and Technology Management; Finance; Organizational Behavior and Human Resources Management; Strategic Management; Marketing. The faculty and doctoral students closely collaborate with researchers across the University of Pittsburgh, one of the nation's leading research institutions. Katz is ranked 39th in North America and 44th in the world from 2009–2013 in Business School Research contribution. One research focus that produced a lot of publications in Finance is M&A deals across many industries. Most faculty members are also very active in business projects from community development to consulting multinational companies.

Research and education centers

There are six education and research centers within Pitt Business: the Katz Center for Executive Education, the Center for Health and Care Work, the David Berg Center for Ethics and Leadership, the Institute for Entrepreneurial Excellence, the International Business Center, and the Center for Supply Chain Management. The later, designated as one of 33 national resource Centers for International Business Education and Research (CIBER) by the U.S. Department of Education, was founded in 1990 as a joint venture of Katz and Pitt's University Center for International Studies. It supports student global business projects, faculty development trips abroad, foreign language instruction programs, research grants, and foreign exchange programs. Katz maintains international linkages with colleges and universities around the world to facilitate study and research abroad. These include Monterrey Institute of Technology in Monterrey, Mexico, Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, in Valparaíso, Chile, the Universitat Augsburg, the Hochschule Pforzheim, Universität Witten/Herdecke and the European Business School near Frankfurt.

Faculty

The faculty at Pitt Business consists of about 90 full-time professors, organized into seven different discipline groups: Accounting, Business Analytics and Operations, Finance, Information Systems and Technology Management, Marketing and Business Economics, and Organizations and Entrepreneurship. Pitt Business faculty members split their teaching duties between the school’s undergraduate business program, MBA programs, Executive MBA program, the Masters of Science in Accounting program, and doctoral program. In addition, faculty members serve as directors of four centers that exist within the school: the David Berg Center for Ethics and Leadership, the Center for Supply Chain Management, the Center for Health and Care Work, and the International Business Center.

The Pitt Business faculty is ranked No. 51 in the world for research productivity from 2010-2014, according to the University of Dallas at Texas report, Top 100 Business Schools Research Rankings™, which is based on the number of publications faculty from a school contribute to 24 top academic journals.

In 2014, the marketing faculty was ranked No. 17 in the world for its research productivity, according to the American Marketing Association’s doctoral special interest group (DocSIG). The report is based on the number of articles published in Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Marketing Science within the past five years. In addition, Pitt Business has three professors ranked No. 19 in the world for their individual research productivity in the four aforementioned academic journals.

Members of the faculty have received the University of Pittsburgh’s Chancellor’s award in the categories of distinguished public service, teaching, and research.

The following notable individuals have served as faculty at Pitt Business.

Alumni

The following notable individuals are graduates of the Katz Graduate School of Business.