Simon Business School’s New STEM Focus Makes it MBA Program of the Year

Business school news website Poets & Quants has crowned the Simon Business School, with its revamped STEM focus, “MBA Program of the Year” for 2018. It is only the second program in the US to receive that honor, after Cornell University. Last year, Cornell’s Johnson School won MBA program of the year for its highly innovative Cornell Tech MBA in New York City.

The Simon School received the distinction due to its newly enhanced MBA curriculum. The program is the first in the country to offer a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) designation. In fact, the designation covers every area of specialization, from banking and corporate finance to brand management and operations.

STEM Focus Designation—A Boon for International MBA Students

A STEM designation makes the program especially attractive to international MBA applicants. Federal government programs allow graduates of STEM-designated degrees to stay in the United States for three years of work experience. The standard is one year.

“Along with benefiting our students, these moves will give Simon a real competitive advantage, because we are the only true STEM business school,” says Simon Dean Andrew Ainslie in a statement announcing the news.

Simon uses an analytical lens to research and teach finance, accounting, operations, marketing, and other facets of business education. The school’s leaders say this designation seemed a perfect fit.

As Gregory Bauer, dean of full-time programs at Simon, puts it: “We were analytical before analytical was cool.”

“The school leveraged its quant-heavy curriculum with a strong focus on analytics and economics to gain STEM designation,” wrote Poets & Quants in their review of the MBA program. “Simon was in a unique position to take advantage of the opportunity.”