The Mendoza College of Business plans to add a Master of Science in Business (MSB) to its graduate school offerings in June 2013.
Roger Huang, Kenneth R. Meyer professor of global investment management and interim dean of Mendoza, said the students will be non-business program college graduates with little to no work experience.
The program will teach business fundamentals that will open the door to career opportunities, Huang said. The program's content will reflect the mission of the University.
"The [program's] mission is to have 'business for the good,'" Huang said.
This mission motivated the emphasis on ethics in the program's business fundamentals curriculum, Huang said.
"An important part of business fundamentals is business ethics," he said.
Huang said the MSB program lasts one year and is comprised of three semesters: summer, fall and spring. Students will complete 44 hours of coursework, he said.
The program will include two specialized courses that will connect each student's undergraduate background to the business world, Huang said.
"We'll try to make it more personal and individualized in that sense," he said.
The University's Career Center will help students find employment opportunities where they can put their new degrees to use, he said.
Huang first proposed the MSB program after meeting with deans from other private business schools in Notre Dame's peer group, he said. Mendoza also conducted its own market assessment of the demand for business education, which indicated a niche for the proposed program.
"What we found is that there's a growing demand for business education among non-business college graduates," Huang said.
The business schools at Duke University, University of Florida, University of Virginia, Arizona State University, Wake Forest University and Catholic University of America have similar master's programs, Huang said. He said the Master of Management Studies program at Duke's Fuqua School of Business was a model for the new MSB program at Mendoza.
"We improved on the Duke program to come up with the current curriculum of our new program," he said.
Huang said efforts to improve the curriculum will continue in order to meet the needs of non-business graduates hoping to enter the business world.
"Right now we are focusing on getting off the block," Huang said. "Once our program is established, however, we want to keep improving it to be the best in the country."
Huang said he also hopes to complement the new program with similar ones in the future. In particular, he said he would like to create a more specialized program in finance.
Huang said such master's programs would complement the MSB program and the established Masters of Science in Accounting (MSA), which provides specialized training in accountancy.
The maximum number of students the program will accept each year is 110, Huang said, but he does not expect full enrollment in the first year.
"The first class will likely be smaller because we have not yet implemented our full marketing strategy, but in the future we hope to not exceed 110 students," he said.
Huang said the college is currently accepting applications for the first class of the MSB program and the application deadline is March 15.
