Founding , the school's founder and namesake
Joseph Wharton, a native
Philadelphian, was a leader in industrial
metallurgy who built his fortune through the American Nickel Company and
Bethlehem Steel Corporation. As Wharton's business grew, he recognized that business knowledge in the United States was only taught through an apprenticeship system, and such a system was not viable for creating a wider economy during the
Second Industrial Revolution. After two years of planning, Wharton in 1881 founded the Wharton School of Finance and Economy through a $100,000 initial pledge, making it the first business school established in the United States.
ESCP Europe, established in 1819, and a few other business schools were established in Europe prior to Wharton's founding The school was meant to train future leaders to conduct corporations and public organizations in a rapidly evolving industrial era. Wharton was quoted as saying that the school was meant to "instill a sense of the coming strife [in business life]: of the immense swings upward or downward that await the competent or the incompetent soldier in this modern strife." The school was renamed the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, in 1902, and formally changed its name to simply Wharton School in 1972.
Development Early on, the Wharton School faculty was tightly connected to an influential group of businessmen, bankers, and lawyers that made up the larger Philadelphia School of Political Economy. The faculty incorporated social sciences into the Wharton curriculum, as the field of business was still under development. Albert S. Bolles, a lawyer, served as Wharton's first professor, and the school's Industrial Research Unit was established in 1921. Wharton professor
Simon Kuznets, who later won the Nobel Prize in Economics, created statistical data on national output, prices, investment, and capital stock and measured seasonability, cycles, and secular trends of these phenomena. His work laid out what became the standard procedure for measuring the
gross national product and the
gross domestic product, and he later led an international effort to establish the same statistical information for all national economies. Professor
Lawrence Klein, who also won the Nobel Prize in Economics, developed the first econometric model of the U.S. economy, which combined economic theory with mathematics, providing another way to test theories and predict future economic trends. He served in several capacities in the federal government, most notably as a
mediator and
arbitrator. During his career, Taylor settled more than 2,000
strikes. In 1967, he helped draft the
New York State
civil service law that legalized
collective bargaining in the state but that also banned strikes by public employees—legislation widely known today as the
Taylor Law. Wharton professor
Wroe Alderson (1898–1964) is widely recognized as the most important marketing theorist of the twentieth century and the "father of modern marketing." Wharton professor Paul Green is considered to be the "father of conjoint analysis" for his discovery of the statistical tool for quantification of market research. Wharton professor
Solomon S. Huebner is known widely as "the father of insurance education." He originated the concept of "human life value," which became a standard method of calculating insurance value and need. He established the goal of professionalism in the field of insurance, developed the first collegiate-level program in insurance and chaired the Department of Insurance at Wharton, and contributed greatly to the progress of adult education in this area. Wharton professor Daniel M. McGill was widely regarded as the "dean of the pension industry," whose research contributed to shaping the modern retirement system both in the public and corporate sectors. In 1946, after
ENIAC was created at the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton created the first multidisciplinary programs in
technology management with the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Wharton faculty began to work closely with
AT&T,
Merrill Lynch,
MasterCard,
Prudential Insurance, and the
New York Stock Exchange in analyzing the strategic and commercial implications of information systems. Bolles started his career as a lawyer in Connecticut in the second half of the 19th century. After resigning from his law firm, he started pursuing a new career in business journalism and was promoted to the editor role of
Bankers Magazine, a trade publication, in 1880. Upon joining the Wharton School, he began teaching business with classes on the law of governing finance and on the processes of commercial banking. Bolles' instruction in finance was influenced by his previous experience in
Bankers Magazine: he stressed conservative business practices, drawing on business history as much as he could. In his classes, inflationist Congressmen were "self-interested debtors." Besides teaching, Bolles advocated for several national reforms, including the uniform banking law. Wharton historian Steven A. Sass wrote about him, "Bolles thus fulfilled Joseph Wharton's pedagogic expectations and…got the new school off to a respectable start by the spring of 1883." Wharton began awarding MBA degrees in 1921. In 1942, during
World War II, in the same fashion of other schools, Wharton's full-time faculty dropped dramatically from 165 to 39 by 1944. According to school historians, members of the faculty were called upon for special posts. In 1959, Wharton adopted the curriculum that is now taught in most major business schools: the program was changed with liberal arts education doubling to almost half of the curriculum. In 1974 the social sciences department, along with the rest of the university's liberal arts programs, was moved to the newly created
University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences. Since then, Wharton faculty have focused exclusively on various aspects of business education. Official historical names of the institution include the Wharton School of Finance and Economy, from 1881 to 1901, and the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce, from 1902 to 1971. The Jay H. Baker Retailing Center at Wharton was permanently endowed by alumnus Jay H. Baker in 2010. It is an interdisciplinary industry research center which was originally established in 2002. The center brings together retail leaders, faculty, and students to discuss the opportunities and challenges of retailers. The Baker Retailing Center also hosts an annual CEO Summit in New York City. On February 26, 2020,
Erika H. James was named dean of the Wharton School, effective July 1, 2020. She is both the first woman and the first African-American to lead the business school. == Campus ==