Harvard created a master's degree for a profession that had no academic field.
In 1908, Harvard University established the Graduate School of Business Administration and began enrolling students in a two-year master's program.1 The school's first class numbered eighty students. At the time, no established academic discipline called "business administration" existed. Law had its law schools, medicine its medical schools, and engineering its colleges. Commerce was something people learned by doing.
The Tuck School at Dartmouth had offered a graduate business degree beginning in 1900, but Harvard's program introduced the case method, adapted from legal education, and built a self-contained professional school modeled on the medical school.2
The MBA remained a niche credential for decades. As late as 1955, fewer than five thousand MBAs were awarded annually in the United States.3 The degree gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s as corporations began treating it as a prerequisite for management positions, and as consulting firms like McKinsey recruited exclusively from top programs.
By the early 2000s, over 100,000 MBA degrees were awarded annually in the United States alone, and programs had spread to universities across every continent.4 Critics argued that the degree's emphasis on case-based reasoning and quantitative analysis produced a narrow kind of leadership, one that optimized for measurable outcomes while ignoring the human dynamics that Follett and Drucker had considered essential.
Henry Mintzberg, a professor at McGill University, argued in his 2004 book Managers Not MBAs that management could only be learned through practice, not through classroom analysis of other people's decisions.5 The credential continued to grow regardless. Harvard's first class of eighty students had generated an entire industry of graduate management education.