A new piece from U.S. News & World Report highlights The Wharton School where MBA students can learn to the necessary business skills to create social impact.
“Sarah Millar spent her first years out of college doing stock market research for a New York City financial firm. In her spare time, she taught English as a second language and fostered homeless dogs. “I was getting a lot more fulfillment from those things,” she says, “than from work.”
Hoping to change that, Millar headed off to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, drawn by its “Social Impact Initiative.” Along with the usual grounding in finance and business strategies, she could focus on ways to make a difference in society.
Today Millar works in social-impact investing at City Light Capital, a venture capital firm in New York that invests in startups aimed at doing good. Examples: ShotSpotter, whose technology helps police and the military pinpoint the location of gunfire, and Arcadia Power, a platform that facilitates the purchasing of renewable energy across utilities in all 50 states.
“I would do it again for twice the cost,” says Millar, 27, who paid for her $200,000 education with loans.
“Our students want to make the world go round in a different way,” says Sherryl Kuhlman, managing director of the Wharton Social Impact Initiative. Students who choose this path, she says, are no longer willing to “take a job they don’t like so they can give their money away later. They want to merge the money and the purpose.”
Business school is certainly still about getting a career boost in finance, consulting or management. But increasingly it’s also about learning to apply private sector strategies to public concerns. Dozens of schools now allow students to pursue an MBA focused on sustainability, social impact or social responsibility.” Read the full piece.
In this same issue, U.S. News & World Report ranked Wharton as #1 for Business Schools, tied with Harvard for 2018.