What MBA Specializations Do T20 Business Schools Provide?
I researched MBA specializations provided at the Top 20 MBA programs and created two visual summaries. Subscribe and I will email you the Excel file.
Who Provides What MBA Specializations?
15 out of the top 20 business schools provide specialization opportunities. Some may call them concentrations, majors, tracks, or even certificates, but essentially business schools are trying to group a selection of courses into one area of focus, so that interested students can instantly make the best decisions for themselves.
Stanford GSB, Harvard Business School, Columbia Business School, Dartmouth College Tuck, and USC Marshall are the 5 schools that don't explicitly provide specializations. Yale SOM only provides a Management Science Major that qualifies as STEM. The Stern School of Business at New York University provides the most specialization opportunities at 29. After that Emory Goizueta and UT McCombs come in second at 23. Wharton, coming in third, provides 20 majors for their students to choose from.
Some schools provide both specializations and certificates; for example, Duke Fuqua provides two certificates, one in Finance and one in Health Sector Management, on top of their ten concentrations. In this case, getting a certificate would require even more time and energy from the students who choose it than a concentration does.
Business schools design specializations by function or by industry, and most of them provide both. Here industry can also mean hot areas where students are likely to get jobs. The top 20 business schools provide a total of 228 specializations, averaging 11.4 each (median at 12.5).
The T20 business schools provide 126 function-based specializations across 13 areas:
Leadership | 5 | Accounting | 10 | CSR | 3 |
Economics | 5 | Finance | 23 | Management Science/ Statistics | 7 |
Management | 11 | Marketing | 22 | Operations | 7 |
Analytics | 13 | Strategy | 11 | Product | 6 |
Supply Chain | 3 |
Finance and Marketing are the most provided specializations, far more than any other specializations.
Finance can include:
- Corporate Finance
- Quantitative Finance
- Financial Instruments and Markets
- Financial Systems and Analytics
Marketing can include:
- Marketing Management
- Digital Marketing
- Brand Management
- Marketing Analytics
The T20 Business Schools provide 102 industry-based specializations across 19 areas:
AI | 2 | Asset Management | 7 | Banking | 3 |
Consulting | 2 | DEI | 4 | ESG/ Energy | 18 |
Emerging Markets | 1 | Entertainment, Media and Sports | 3 | Entrepreneurship | 14 |
Growth | 1 | Healthcare | 12 | Law and Business | 1 |
Luxury & Retail | 1 | Real Estate | 8 | Social Impact | 6 |
Technology Management | 5 | FinTech | 2 | VC and PE | 4 |
International Business | 8 |
ESG/Energy, Entrepreneurship, and Healthcare are the top three industry-based specializations, and the only ones with a total number of more than 10.
What Do All These Mean?
Does this mean that the 5 schools that don't provide specializations only train generalists? Probably not. These schools all provide a wide range of course selections in various areas for students to choose from, and from this aspect, they aren't that much different from the ones that provide specializations.
There is also no direct correlation between the ranking of a business school and the likelihood of it providing specializations. For example, HBS provides none but Wharton provides 20; Northwestern Kellogg Provides 19, but Yale SOM provides only one, etc.
It's pretty common that business schools provide specializations that are related to the strengths of their own universities. For example, CMU is widely regarded as one of the best in computer science and software engineering; the CMU Tepper School of Business provides 4 specializations/tracks related to tech, i.e. Business Technologies, Management Innovation and Product Development, Technology Strategy and Product Management, and AI in Business. The same happens with Duke Fuqua and its Health Sector Management (Duke has one of the best med schools in the country).
Additionally, schools in large markets leverage their locations and create industry specific specializations that are hard to replicate. For example, NYU Stern, UCLA Anderson, and Emory Goizueta, which are located in New York City, Los Angeles, and Atlanta respectively, all of which are large media markets, are the only three schools that provide specializations in media and entertainment.
Should MBA specializations affect which schools you apply to and which one you actually go to? Specializations are indicators that a business school is strong in a specific domain. While they don't especially want to be known as a "marketing school" or a "finance school", you should be aware of their strengths and weaknesses by aligning your career interests with their strengths, and looking at specializations is one way to do so.
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