P&Q’s 2026 Best In Class: Berkeley Haas, Social Impact

When people think of social impact in business education, they think of Berkeley Haas. The school earns Poets&Quants’ 2026 Best in Class award for it not because of a single program or center, but because the commitment is written into the school’s identity, its four Defining Leadership Principles, and especially the one called “Beyond Yourself.”

It is also older than the phrase “social impact” itself. Haas taught its first course on corporate social responsibility in 1959, and in 1964 Earl Cheit, a professor and future dean, convened a landmark Berkeley conference on the role of business in society. What began as a conviction is now an apparatus: 35 ladder and professional faculty working in the field, seven centers and institutes, more than 50 related electives, and a set of student funds that invest real money.

BAKED IN BY THE TIME THEY LEAVE

Dean Jenny Chatman, a renowned scholar of organizational culture, treats the Defining Leadership Principles as living things. Every year, she meets every first-year student across all of the school’s programs to walk them through the history of the principles and invite them to make the ideas their own.

“If it wasn’t baked in when they got here,” she says, “it certainly is baked in by the time they leave.”

She saw it up close on a recent global tour meeting alumni around the world. The graduates were strikingly diverse, she says, but shared three qualities: they were brilliant, they were relentlessly curious, and they were kind.

“Universally kind, people who want the world to be a better place, and who feel the obligation on their shoulders” to make it so, she says. She assumes the school selects for it, drawing mission-driven people to a public university built around social mobility, but the consistency still surprised her.

THE TRANSLATIONAL ARM

What strikes her most is that the impact rarely runs through the nonprofit sector. Her graduates do the good work inside for-profit companies, in clean tech, sustainable investing, even food waste. She points to an alumna who built a corporate giving program at Intel until most of the company took part, then left to launch a company delivering education across Africa on basic flip phones, designed to resume a lesson right where a student lost connectivity.

That pattern reflects how Chatman sees the school’s role on a research campus.

“I view Haas as the translational arm for the campus,” she says, the place where upstream scientific, engineering, and epidemiological discoveries get turned into something real.

She describes a 2023 graduate named Hannah who joined two chemists from Berkeley’s national lab, built a company around their method for extracting lead from human blood, and, Chatman says, won a $236 million government contract a year later. “Those stories abound.”

The lineage runs deep. Chatman rattles off Patrick Awuah, MBA 99, who built Ghana’s Ashesi University into one of Africa’s most important institutions, and Paul Rice, MBA 96, who founded Fair Trade USA. What unites them, she argues, isn’t one principle but the combination.

“They question the status quo, they’re students always, they’re confident, but they’re not arrogant in any way,” she says. “There’s something about the combination that results in a kind of magical formula for doing good for the world.”

Turning that impulse into action is the job of the Center for Social Sector Leadership, which engages more than 650 undergraduate and MBA students a year across 20-plus courses and four experiential programs.

“We see so many students choosing Haas because they want to use their business degree to make the world a better place,” says Omri Even-Tov, an associate professor and the center’s faculty director. “Our job is to help them turn that intention into action, starting with deploying students to tackle real problems in real time through their work with community partners.”

The center’s flagship, a consulting course called Social Sector Solutions, marked 20 years in 2026 and has sent more than 1,000 students to work for nonprofit and public-sector clients, with results that outlast the semester. By the school’s account, an S3 model of the cost of child abuse was adopted by most of California’s 58 counties and helped shape statewide child-welfare policy; an S3-designed menopause health program now serves more than 2,800 incarcerated women across two California prisons and is expanding nationally; and recommendations for the Berkeley Food Network helped recover more than a million pounds of food.

The stakes are real in dollars, too. Haas students manage three investment vehicles with actual capital, including a $4.5 million sustainable investment fund, and the Golub Capital Board Fellows program has grown from eight students to 80 a year serving on nonprofit boards. A new High-Impact Philanthropy Lab, launching in spring 2027, will put MBAs in charge of allocating $50,000 in grants to Bay Area nonprofits.

NOT AN OUNCE OF DISILLUSIONMENT

It is, Chatman notes, a complicated moment for any school committed to purpose. So she listens. At a recent lunch for student entrepreneurs funded by a Class of 1970 alumnus, she went around the table expecting to hear disillusionment and heard none. One pair is building electric cargo ships for inland waterways, from Oakland up to Sacramento through the Delta, undaunted that the current administration has pulled back support.

“It’s coming, it’s gonna come back,” she recalls them saying. “Our students are exuberant. There’s a kind of enthusiasm in the air that’s just really contagious.”

Part of “Beyond Yourself,” she adds, is that students have each other’s backs, swapping introductions and solutions. The school’s job is to keep building the venues where that happens, from the SkyDeck accelerator to its entrepreneurship hubs and programming.

As for what comes next, sustainability and social impact is one of four strategic initiatives, alongside AI, entrepreneurship, and health. Chatman expects AI to recede into the foundation that feeds the others, leaving what she calls “the magic three.” The near-term work is connective: linking the sprawling set of centers, among them the Energy Institute, CleanTech to Market, the Center for Responsible Business, the Center for Social Sector Leadership, and the Master of Climate Solutions, so students can actually use all of it, and raising money so a student doesn’t have to take a consulting job for the paycheck instead of chasing the idea that might change the world.

DOING GOOD, NOT FEELING GOOD

If Chatman supplies the mission, economist Jim Sallee supplies the discipline. Sallee, who studies which policies genuinely cut emissions and co-directs the Master of Climate Solutions, is blunt about the goal.

“We don’t want our students to feel good. That’s not the goal,” he says. “Our goal is for them to actually do good, and to actually have a real impact.”

Across the Haas faculty, he says, the thread is empirical rigor and accountability, “having the receipts” rather than patting yourself on the back for good intentions. That carries an equity lens he returns to as an environmental economist. Markets deliver efficiency, he tells students, not fairness, and pollution falls hardest on poor communities, while Californians pay more for power than it costs to deliver.

“There’s nothing about market allocations that leads to equity or fairness automatically,” he says. “It is something you have to engineer.”

The Master of Climate Solutions was built around that conviction, named for solutions on purpose, and designed to produce people who move the needle rather than compliance officers who file reports. Dwelling on how big the problems are, he warns, is “debilitating”; the energy comes from knowing which course of action actually works.

Measuring whether it works is, he admits, the hard part. The program tracks touchpoints, students, classes, careers, but Sallee won’t call that proof.

“We have amazing people coming in and out of here. How do we know that we caused that?” he says. “If you ask me in a year, I hope I have a more numerical answer.”

That numerical answer is, in a sense, already a Haas specialty, housed a few doors down. The Institute for Business and Social Impact, founded in 2013 by economist Laura Tyson and led by Professor Paul Gertler, exists to apply formal impact evaluation, the methodology for testing whether an intervention actually works. Gertler is the lead author of the World Bank’s textbook on the subject and its former chief economist for human development.

“At Haas, we want social impact to be grounded in evidence and connected to real problems,” Gertler says. “Our faculty and students are working on issues ranging from financial inclusion and workplace mental health to shared ownership, education, and the responsible use of AI. The common thread is leveraging business and research tools to improve people’s lives.”

The work is as rigorous as the claim. A Gertler-led study of a three-week entrepreneurship program for 4,400 Ugandan high schoolers found income gains that persisted four years later, driven mostly by self-employment and strongest among women; the program is now scaling to 10,000 students. Other institute partnerships have put the same tools in front of policymakers, from public-procurement monitoring with Chile’s government to a state-level workplace mental health initiative.

AN EMBARRASSMENT OF RICHES

Ask Sallee why a student should come to Berkeley for this, and he lands on depth.

“Berkeley has an embarrassment of riches,” he says, and what matters most in a professional school is ladder faculty whose core research translates into the classroom, with “no substitute for that.” 

Between the Energy Institute, a CleanTech to Market course that has run graduate teams on more than 120 cleantech projects since 2008, impact investing, a food initiative, and a law school he can “throw a rock and hit” from his office, the real challenge, he says, is almost the opposite of scarcity: helping students navigate more opportunity than one person can ever use.

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