Tepper School of Business

History

In 1946, economist George Bach was hired by the Carnegie Institute of Technology (predecessor of Carnegie Mellon University) to restart the school’s economics department. Bach had previously been working at the Federal Reserve during World War II. He added William W. Cooper from the field of Operations Research (which had increased its visibility during the war) and Herbert A. Simon, a political scientist who was to direct the undergraduate business program. The beginnings of the Cold War were applying pressure on the academic community to increase US managerial ability, and when William Larimer Mellon gave a $6 million grant to found a school of industrial administration, Bach became the first dean, bringing along the entire economics department.

Under Bach’s leadership, in 1958, the school's Management Game was the first to use computer simulations for experiential learning of business roles; such simulations have subsequently been adopted by other institutions. In 1989, the school's Financial Analysis and Security Trading Center (FAST) was the first educational institution to successfully replicate the live international data feeds and sophisticated software of Wall Street trading firms.

Prior to the founding of the Tepper School, management education typically used the case method approach popularized at the Harvard Business School, based upon examples from successful companies and microeconomic theory. Although the Tepper school did not entirely abandon those traditional models and theories, it has focused on management science, or decision making based on quantitative models and an analytical approach.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Tepper School of Business led the intellectual movement known as the Carnegie School, a freshwater economics approach which emphasized behavioral, decision-making, and quantitative methods. As an example, the school has produced nine Nobel Prize winners in Economics: Robert Lucas, Jr., Merton Miller, Franco Modigliani, Herbert A. Simon, Oliver E. Williamson, Edward Prescott, Finn Kydland, Dale Mortensen, and Lars Peter Hansen. Lucas was awarded the prize for developing and applying the theory of rational expectations, an econometric hypothesis that directly challenged Keynesian orthodoxy. Modigliani's prize recognized his life-cycle hypothesis, which attempts to explain the level of saving in the economy. Modigliani proposed that consumers would aim for a stable level of income throughout their lifetime, for example by saving during their working years and spending during their retirement. Miller's prize was awarded in recognition of his contributions to corporate finance. The results of his research—in collaboration with Franco Modigliani—are now taught in every business school in the country. Simon's prize was given for his development of the idea of bounded rationality in economics, described as "pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations". In 2004, Kydland and Prescott received the Nobel Prize for "their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles".

On March 19, 2003, David Tepper, founder of hedge fund Appaloosa Management announced that he would make a single donation of $55,000,000 to Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration. This donation was made after he had been encouraged by Kenneth Dunn, his former professor (who became dean of the school). Tepper accepted the suggestion but made the contribution a “naming gift” and suggested that the school's name be changed to the David A. Tepper School of Business. Further, in November 2013, Carnegie Mellon announced a $67 million gift from Tepper to develop the Tepper Quadrangle on the north campus. The Tepper Quad will include a new Tepper School facility across the street from the Heinz College as well as other university-wide buildings and a welcome center which will serve as a public gateway to the university.

Two other colleges: the School of Computer Science and the Heinz College were spin-offs by the business school's faculty.

Undergraduate Business

The school offers a traditional four-year undergraduate degree in business administration. The program's coursework places an emphasis on quantitative decision making and analytical problem solving. The structure of the undergraduate program is distinctly different from the Master of Business Administration (MBA) program, emphasizing breadth of academic experience over focused professionally oriented courses. Students major in business administration and choose one or two of the following concentration areas to specialize in:

For the academic year ending in May 2007, there were 475 total students enrolled in the undergraduate program.

Undergraduate Economics

The Undergraduate Economics Program is jointly administered by the Tepper School and the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences. It has been designed to prepare students for careers as economic analysts in either the private or public sector, for advanced professional studies in business, law and public policy, as well as for entry into PhD programs in Economics, Finance, and related fields.

MBA programs

The school's primary MBA degree (previously named MSIA) is a two-year, full-time program, during which most students complete an internship in the summer between the first and second year of study. Students have the option of waiving the summer internship and taking classes, which allows full-time students to complete their studies in 16 months. Working professionals in the Pittsburgh area may also complete the MBA degree in the evening as members of the flex-time program.

The mini-semester system is half the length of a traditional academic semester, with four mini-semesters per academic year. Each is 7.5 weeks long, and students typically take 5 different courses each mini-semester. This system, which was pioneered by the Tepper School, allows students to take more than 32 different courses while enrolled in the MBA program. The Tepper School prefers this structure as students can gain exposure to a greater breadth of topics, as well as several electives.

The MBA curriculum is designed to increase in complexity and application throughout students' time at the Tepper School. The first year builds a fundamental skill set in the core disciplines, including Finance, Operations, Marketing, Strategy, Organizational Behavior and Technology. Year two advances the theories and analytical framework developed in the first year to provide breadth and depth in areas that support corporate strategy and general management as students complete three to four concentrations in specific functional areas. In lieu of selecting three to four general management concentrations, second year students may complete courses in satisfaction of specialized MBA Tracks.

The Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Tepper holds an annual Venture Competition every spring in three tracks: Technology, Life Sciences, and Sustainable Technology. Teams from many universities and countries compete for cash prizes and venture startup assistance. Entrepreneurship education was pioneered at the school in the 1970s, under the leadership of Dr. Jack Thorne.

The Management Game was first introduced by Carnegie Mellon in 1958 and has been adopted by many other business schools as an effective business simulation model. Tepper students work with an external board of directors to manage a multinational corporation, guiding the organization through a wide range of issues including global expansion, labor negotiations, operations, market share, shifting economies and financial performance.

They also have a Capstone project, which is like a culmination of all the students work at Tepper. It is akin to a final year project where the students work with various firms on real world problems.

The General Management MBA Track, the core track serves as an umbrella academic option due to the flexibility associated with multiple concentrations. The General Management MBA Track complements the eight other Tepper MBA Tracks: Analytical Marketing Strategy, Biotechnology, Entrepreneurship in Organizations, Global Enterprise Management, Management of Innovation & Product Development, Technology Leadership, Operations Research, and Investment Strategy.

Tepper also offers the following joint and dual MBA degrees:

For the academic year ending in May 2007, there were 302 total students enrolled in the full-time MBA program.

MS Computational Finance

The MSCF degree is primary granted through a sixteen-month full-time program. The school also offers a thirty-three month part-time degree program and four non-degree certificate programs. Certificate students focus on one "stream" of the MSCF degree curriculum: Mathematics, Statistics or Financial Computing.

The curriculum consists of courses in finance, traditional finance theories of equity and bond portfolio management, the stochastic calculus models on which derivative trading is based, the application of these models in both fixed income markets and equity markets, computational methods including Monte Carlo simulation and finite difference approximations of partial differential equations, and statistical methodologies including regression and time series, culminating with courses on statistical arbitrage, risk management and dynamic asset management. Early in the program, students are taught C++, which enables them to build the computational financial models necessary for their finance courses. The program's capstone is a sophisticated financial computing course.

Twenty full-time faculty instruct 40 full-time students in Pittsburgh and 51 full and part-time students in the financial district of New York City. The primary method of instruction for the New York campus is live, interactive video. Lectures are recorded and made immediately available to students via the internet. Faculty teach twice every seven weeks in New York at which times the students are invited to join the professor for lunch after class.

Doctoral Program

The doctoral degree is organized around a preliminary set of courses in the core disciplines of Economics, Organization Behavior and Theory, and Operations Research. The foundational knowledge and methodologies that students in the doctoral program learn form the basis for further study and research either in one of the core disciplines, or in one or more of the remaining functional areas of business: Accounting, Financial Economics, Information Systems, Marketing, or Manufacturing and Operating Systems.

The school also offers PhD degrees jointly with other colleges in the University:

All doctoral candidates receive full tuition, plus a stipend for three years, through the William Larimer Mellon Fund.

Executive Education

In addition to customizable executive programs, the Tepper School offers three executive education events for the 2007 calendar year:

International study

Carnegie Bosch Institute

The Carnegie Bosch Institute for Applied Studies in International Management (CBI) is an alliance between the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon and the Bosch Group, a leading German-based multinational corporation with long-standing operations in North America. The institute was founded in the summer of 1990 to form a link between management and academia in the field of international management research. The CBI was established through a donation made by the Robert Bosch Corporation.

Global Study Abroad

The International Management MBA Track features an eight-week global experience in which students travel to Western and Eastern Europe to study emerging, transitional and competitive economies. During study abroad, students experience real-world aspects of classroom work through manufacturing tours, presentations at financial institutions, meetings with government and non-governmental organizations as well as the experience of living in an international setting. This program operates in partnership with the WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management.

Undergraduate business students are also encouraged to explore opportunities to learn about different cultures in which to live and work. Each year students travel abroad as part of a capstone educational experience.

Research centers

From its outset, academic research has been one of the primary focuses of the Tepper School. When speaking of the school's founders, one author stated "Research was their fundamental engine of progress". The Tepper School has established 16 different research centers to continue the emphasis on research established at the school's founding.

Alexander Henderson Award

The Alexander Henderson Award is presented to the student at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University who displays the best work in the field of economic theory. A large proportion of the winners of the award has later made contributions to economics that have changed the practice of the field. Since its inception, four recipients have already been awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. Among the deceased award winners are John Muth, known as "the father of the rational expectations revolution"; Albert Ando, among the very pioneers of overlapping-generations models; and Jan Mossin who derived the Capital Asset Pricing Model.

Rankings

The ranking of MBA programs has been discussed in articles and on academic Web sites. One study found that objectively ranking MBA programs by a combination of graduates' starting salaries and average student Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) score can reasonably duplicate the top 20 list of the national publications. The study concluded that a truly objective ranking would be individualized to the needs of each prospective student.

Business Week Graduate Rankings – 2013

Business Week Graduate Rankings – 2014

Business Week Undergraduate Rankings – 2011

Forbes – 2005

Financial Times – 2015

Financial Times – 2015: A league of their own: the top 10 MBA programmes in selected categories

Financial Times – 2010

U.S. News & World Report - 2016 (Graduate)

U.S. News & World Report - 2017 (Undergraduate)

Wall Street Journal Rankings - 2007