Wharton vs. Harvard Business School

Geography: Boston and Philadelphia are two of American’s greatest cities, filled with history and cultural diversity. Boston, by many standards, may be more dynamic and vibrant, but that’s a bit worthy of a Philly cheesesteak. If you’re a movie fan, you’ll understand that it really is the difference between Good Will Hunting and Rocky. Boston is one of the world’s most dynamic and inviting cities. It is both an academic Disneyland and a city of working class folks. Fenway Park, home of the Boston Red Sox, is just minutes away from Harvard. So is world-class arts and culture of all kinds. The winter months can be tough, with lots of cold and snow. January and February in Philly, on the other hand, is less likely to require long underwear. Wharton’s location in the heart of Philadelphia makes it a fast train ride away from either New York or Washington. Despite some concerns over the neighborhood surrounding the school, Wharton is in an extremely safe and comfortable place. With the fifth largest population in the U.S., Philadelphia is a great, compact city, with world-class restaurants and cultural attractions. Most students who attend Wharton have never been to Philadelphia and are usually pleasantly surprised by the city’s livability. Says Wharton’s Cutler: It’s fair to say that you can’t compare Philly to New York. They are different places. It’s not better or worse, they are different.”

Size: Harvard and Wharton are among the largest full-time MBA programs in the world. But both schools divide up the incoming class in ways that allow for significant bonding and camaraderie. At Harvard, every incoming class of some 900 students is carved up into ten sections, from A to J, of 90 students each. Each section takes classes together the first year. Students also are assigned to learning teams consisting of six students from different sections. These learning teams are usually meet daily throughout the first year to prepare for each day’s class assignments. At Wharton, incoming students are divided into four groups of about 210 students that are known as clusters. Then, each cluster is chopped into three cohorts of about 70 students, a full 20 students less than each Harvard section. Every cohort moves through the core curriulum as a unit, sharing the first year of their academic experience. Unlike HBS, you can waive out of the core courses if you have prior experience in the subject and move onto more advanced coursework. Only three courses can’t be waived at Wharton: business ethics, leadership, and communications.

Culture: While it’s a myth that competition is cut-throat among students at Harvard, it’s also true that the HBS environment is generally more competitive and intense. Size helps to breed some of this competitiveness among students, but so does the dominance of the case study method of teaching (see below) and the grading system. On the other hand, Wharton isn’t much different. After all, both Wharton and Harvard are big-city schools with all the advantages and disadvantages that come with being in active, dynamic cities. Typically, schools in large urban settings tend to have more intense and competitive cultures. It’s easier to escape school in a big city than it is in a college town or rural setting. Wharton has one significant disadvantage for MBA students: it has one of the largest undergraduate business and executive educations programs in the world, with 2,621 undergrads and 9,000 executives attending seminars and longer programs. That means the faculty and the resources are stretched across a lot of students.

Facilities: Wharton has among the most modern and handsome facilities of any business school in the world. Yet, it’s no match against Harvard. No school is. Harvard Business School is like a university onto itself with 33 separate buildings on 40 acres of property along the Charles River. HBS has its own state-of-the-art fitness center, a massive library, a chapel, and several residence halls for students who want to stay on campus. Strategy guru Michael Porter and his Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness even has his own building on campus. There is no other business school that can even remotely match Harvard for its expansive classrooms and study halls. If Wharton were being compared to any other business school in the world, it would be hard to beat. The B-school campus is composed of seven buildings on and off Locust Walk, the brick-lined pedestrian thoroughfare at the heart of Penn. The buildings are closely clustered around the area of campus known as the “Wharton Quad,” a great meeting place and hub for students. The newest building, Jon M. Huntsman Hall, is home to both the undergraduate and graduate divisions of Wharton. It represents the single largest addition of academic space on the Penn campus in more than half a century. It’s a gorgeous world-class building of 320,000 square feet, designed around Wharton’s cohort learning model. This building alone boasts 48 clasrooms, four computer labs, 57 group study rooms, four floors of faculty offices, a 300-seat auditorium, student cafes and study lounges. If you’re keeping count, it’s essentially seven buildings at Wharton vs. 33 at Harvard.

Teaching Methods: At Harvard, the case study thoroughly dominates. Sure there are team projects, simulations and experiential learning in the mix, but the primary learning tool at Harvard is the case study: stories of executives and companies in the depths of a major challenge or problem. There are 30 cases in a course. The ten courses you’ll take at Harvard in the first year alone will require that you read 300 case studies. As a current HBS student who blogs under the non de plume “MilitarytoBusiness” explains, the average student in a 90-plus person class gains air time to comment on a case every other class. “That means that the professor determines half of your grade on an average of 15 comments over the period of three-to-five months. That’s not an incredibly deep well of information to help differentiate 94 highly talented students,” he says. That is the consequence of case studies in a 90-plus person class environment. Obviously, the system breeds a certain level of competition. At Wharton, case studies make up just 35% of the classroom instruction, vs. 80%, while lectures account for 20% and team projects take up 25% of the work.

Program Focus:

The most common misperception about Wharton is that it is largely a finance school, while the greatest myth about Harvard is that it is a school for the corporate elite. While it’s true that Wharton boasts a superb finance faculty and Harvard’s general management focus breeds corporate leaders, these world-class schools are far more than their reputations represent. Wharton offers a dazzling array of course options and program alternatives, with more elective courses than any other business school in the world, nearly 200 across 11 academic departments (not including courses you can take elsewhere at the University of Pennsylvania). Wharton has a staff of more than 250 faculty members. Wharton offers 18 majors to its students and also opens a door to allow its students to work with faculty and administration to develop new courses. Taking five courses in a field qualifies you for one of Wharton’s majors, including such narrow fields as health care management and environmental and risk management. In most specific areas of study, such as international business, finance, marketing, management, and entrepreneurship, Wharton is among the most highly regarded in the world for the quality of its faculty and their research

With a full-time faculty of 228, HBS offers an unusual breadth and diversity of courses as well. Harvard lists 130 electives in its course catalog, and a few real surprises. A case in point: entrepreneurship. Harvard has its own building devoted to the subject, the Arthur Rock Center, named after the HBS alum who invested in both Apple and Intel. Harvard boasts 35 faculty members who teach entrepreneurship, the second largest faculty group at the school. All first-year MBAs at Harvard have a required course in entrepreneurship and can choose from nearly two dozen second-year electives on the topic. As a percentage, only 3% to 4% of Harvard grads launch companies right out of school. At Wharton, possibly because of the collapse of finance in 2009, about 5% of its grads started entrepreneurial ventures right out of school. However, 15 years out of HBS, about half of its grads end up as entrepreneurs. Even more surprisingly, Harvard alums compose nearly 25% of the entire venture capital industry. Clearly, it’s a myth that Harvard is the breeding ground for just corporate chieftains.

In the 2010 survey of B-school deans and directors by U.S. News & World Report, Wharton bested Harvard in six of nine different specialty categories. Harvard placed better than Wharton in general management, a field in which HBS is rated first in the world, entrepreneurship, and nonprofit management. Wharton, according to the survey, beat Harvard out in finance, marketing, international business, manufacturing, information systems, and accounting. In some of these specialties, the gap between Wharton and Harvard was significant: 18 spots in accounting; eight places in information systems, as well as six spots in finance and six in manufacturing. What to make of all this? Harvard has long been the leader in management education by making itself relevant to business professionals–not other academics. Some of the differences in this survey reflect the tendency of academics to reward and to honor pure academic research, not practical relevance to managers and executives, where Harvard is exceptionally strong. Nonetheless, these specialty rankings are a data point worth consideration.

Program Specialties Harvard Rank Wharton Rank
Management 1 4
Finance 7 1
Entrepreneurship 4 5
Marketing 5 2
Manufacturing 9 3
Social Entrepreneurship 5 8
International 5 2
Information Systems 15 7
Accounting 20 2

Source: U.S. News & World Report 2010 specialty rankings.

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On-Campus Recruiting: Harvard and Wharton boast well-resourced and highly sophisticated recruiting machines. You’d be hardpressed to find two other schools in the world that devote as much money and effort to getting their students employed in great jobs. Every major MBA recruiter comes to these two campuses. A quick look at the firms recruiting at Wharton and Harvard is a virtual Who’s Who of prestige employers.

Alumni Network: Is it even remotely possible that there is a group of alumni in the world that is more influential and powerful than the alums of the Harvard Business School? We seriously doubt it. More chairmen, chief executives, and presidents of major corporations around the world, and more founders of highly successful entrepreneurial ventures, hail from Harvard than any other university. Harvard’s alumni network is extraordinary. To name just a few, HBS alums include the CEOs of American Airlines, Aon Corp., Anadarko Petroleum, Boeing, Boston Scientific, Corning Inc., ConAgra Foods, CSX, Cummins Engine, Danaher Corp., General Electric, Hess, JP Morgan Chase, L.L. Bean, PPG Industries, Research in Motion, Schering-Plough, Staples, Tata, Tenet Healthcare, Time Inc., Toys ’R’ Us,  Liberty Media, Mastercard, Palm, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and Vodafone Group. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Montreal Mayor Gerald Tremblay, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, and former U.S. President George Bush all have Harvard MBAs. But Harvard alums are not only in positions of authority around the globe: they are also extremely helpful to each other. Over the years, BusinessWeek surveys of MBA graduates show that Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth boast the strongest alumni networks of any business schools in the world. With 41,378 living MBA alums, Harvard’s network is large, diverse, and very global.

Wharton can’t hope to match the power and might of Harvard’s alums, but it does claims the largest alumni network of any business school in the world: 85,000 alums in 140 countries. That figure includes Wharton’s sizable undergraduate output. It’s a sure bet that wherever you are in the world, you’ll find Wharton MBAs or even a Wharton Alumni Club to use as a networking base. Wharton’s big guns include the CEOs of British-American Tobacco, Estee Lauder, Hershey, Hewitt Associates, Medtronic, Omnicom Group, Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, Northwest Airlines, Philips, Tiffany & Co., UPS, US Airways, and Quaker Oats Co. Not a bad lineup.

 

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