MIT’s Sloan School of Management
Rounding out our round up of best business schools for technology is MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Though not quite as widely celebrated as Silicon Valley for its nexus of tech opportunities, the Boston-Cambridge area is respectable runner up. It’s home to a large and growing network of entrepreneurs and tons of startup incubators and accelerators.
That Sloan shares a campus with one of the best engineering schools in the world doesn’t hurt, either. Almost a full third of Sloan MBAs—30 percent—have an engineering background. As one MIT Sloan grad wrote eloquently in response to a naysayer foretelling a soon-to-burst tech bubble, “I think having hard tech skills makes you more immune to macroeconomic shifts, not less. Tech firms want people with hard skills (analytics, programming, engineering, design etc.) alongside traditional MBA skills because they can add value to all sides of a business. These are the skills that will keep MBAs relevant as consulting, CPG, general management, finance all become more tech intensive.”
Not quite a third of Sloan’s Class of 2015—30.6 percent—took jobs in the technology industry. Though consulting made up a larger slice of the employment pie, drawing 32.1 percent of the class, tech has been gaining steadily, up from 26.1 percent in 2014 and 19.3 percent in 2013.
Sloan students can choose to take part in an Entrepreneurship & Innovation (E&I) Track. Every student in E&I starts out in a course called “Introduction to Technological Innovation,” designed to provide foundational knowledge needed for creating and building successful startups—whether tech-based or not. Electives offered within the track run the gamut from basic technology management to “Law and Cutting-Edge Technology” and the “Business of Robotics.”
Each spring, students in the E&I Track head off on a Silicon Valley Study Tour (SVST), which takes them to the Bay Area to visit a range of firms in the life sciences, medical technology, software, information technology, advanced materials and new energy fields. Those who successfully complete all of their MBA coursework as well as the requirements for E&I receive a Certificate in Entrepreneurship & Innovation.
Like Tepper, Sloan also offers a dual-degree program, called the System Design and Management (SDM) program, in partnership with the MIT School of Engineering, that gives students who want it even greater technical depth to complement a breadth of management and leadership skills.
Outside of the classroom, Sloan offers tech-focused students a wide assortment of opportunities through its Data Analytics Club, Entrepreneurship & Innovation Club, MIT FinTech Club, MIT Sloan Coders Club and MIT Sloan Tech Club. These groups provide career preparation, networking opportunities, conferences and workshops.
There is also an annual MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, which has given rise to a bevy of successful tech-focused companies, including content network service provider Akamai; Brontes Technologies, which provides proprietary 3-D intraoral imaging technology; e-business solution provider C-Bridge Internet Solutions; and Silicon Spice, a telecommunications chip maker acquired by Broadcom for $1.2 billion.
With so ways to hone technical skills, it’s not surprising the big tech firms come calling on Sloan’s Cambridge campus. Top hirers for the Class of 2015 included Amazon, which snapped up 22 Sloanies, Google, which hired 14, and Apple and Microsoft, which each took seven. The median starting salary for Sloan graduates heading into the tech industry was $120,000.
Many MBA Options for Tech
Even if you missed the Montessori boat as a child, rest assured that there are many great business schools that can prepare you for successful, lucrative, dynamic careers in technology. We’ve focused on Tepper, Haas, Anderson and Sloan here, but Stanford Graduate School of Business sends nearly a third of its grads into tech, too (as you might expect from a school situated in the very heart of Silicon Valley). And at each Harvard, Tuck, Fuqua, Ross and McCombs, nearly one in every five students follows a tech path.
Indeed, more and more business school students are seeking out technical skills to complement MBA coursework in strategy, finance and entrepreneurship—and MBA programs have to adapt to keep pace not only with student demand but also with an undeniably digital world. “Ultimately, it allows you to work on both sides of a business, rather than being a ‘one trick pony,’” wrote the Sloan alum in favor of a tech-based approach to management education. “If the tech bubble bursts, it will be people who don’t have a combination of skills that will be hit.”
