People and Programs
Columbia Business School maintains its position as one of the top centers of graduate business education by continually enhancing its programs and practices and by attracting premier scholars and the most talented students. Creating such a dynamic learning community would not be possible without critical gifts in support of faculty, financial aid, curriculum initiatives, and research.
Faculty
The extraordinary depth and breadth of Columbia Business School’s faculty members reflects the institution’s unwavering commitment to being a place where distinguished thinkers not only develop ideas that influence scholarship and impact business practice, but also help train future generations of leaders. The competition to recruit the foremost scholars, however, has increased dramatically.
Endowed professorships are among the highest and most effective honors a university can confer, and these named chairs provide the School with an incredibly powerful recruiting tool. Appointment to a named chair is understood throughout the academic world as a statement that a professor has a broad understanding of his or her field, an important vision for the future, and an exceptional ability to communicate that understanding and vision to others. Named chairs also build community by attracting junior faculty members and PhD students who are eager to work with the outstanding faculty members that these chairs reward, as well as students who relish the opportunity to learn from and interact with such renowned and respected thought leaders.
Financial Aid
For generations, Columbia Business School graduates have gone on to distinguish themselves as leaders in business, government, academia, and the nonprofit sector. To sustain and build upon this remarkable tradition, the School must continue to draw in the very best and brightest students, and there is no means more crucial to this effort than financial aid. The fierce competition for talent intensifies with each passing year, and many of the strongest MBA applicants face a difficult choice between Columbia and other top-tier business schools — schools that utilize their vast endowment resources to invest heavily in appealing financial aid packages.
Columbia Business School can ensure that enormously talented students do choose Columbia by liberating their decisions from financial constraints. To this end, the School is committed to offering more aid packages that are on par with those of its peer schools, but doing so will require further investment by the School’s alumni and friends. As the School strives to provide its students with opportunities to grow and explore their abilities and passions with the freedom of financial security, gifts in support of financial aid have a tremendous impact and help talented individuals to realize their full potential.
Curriculum Initiatives
Innovative programs and curicula are hallmarks of the Columbia Business School experience. By leveraging its thought leadership, New York location, and extensive links to the international business community, the School connects theory with practice in truly meaningful ways for the benefit of students, alumni, and practitioners.
Recent curricular innovations have included the creation of cross-disciplinary areas, or CDAs — opportunities for research, collaboration, and teaching across traditional academic disciplines — and the Program on Social Intelligence, a series of courses and extracurricular activities designed to enhance students’ leadership abilities throughout their careers. The creation and expansion of these initiatives and more would not be possible without the financial support and enthusiastic involvement of the School’s friends and alumni.
Research
Columbia Business School possesses a well-deserved reputation for harnessing the powerful partnership between scholarly research and industry practice, partnering with business leaders to frame — and then answer — the most pressing questions facing the global business community. Upholding this tradition of academic excellence requires more than intellectual capital: it calls for greater and sustained financial support to sponsor more ambitious and increased numbers of research projects, and to underwrite the dissemination of research output. Such support yields multiple benefits, including providing faculty with access to in-house funding for their research; enhancing the School’s ability to attract foremost scholars in the increasingly competitive graduate business education marketplace; fostering a more dynamic learning environment for students; and encouraging practitioners to think of Columbia Business School as a home to cutting-edge research and as a potential partner.