Sarah Millar spent her first years out of college doing stock market research for a New York City financial firm. In her spare time, she taught English as a second language and fostered homeless dogs. “I was getting a lot more fulfillment from those things,” she says, “than from work.”
Hoping to change that, Millar headed off to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, drawn by its “Social Impact Initiative.” Along with the usual grounding in finance and business strategies, she could focus on ways to make a difference in society.
Today Millar works in social-impact investing at City Light Capital, a venture capital firm in New York that invests in startups aimed at doing good. Examples: ShotSpotter, whose technology helps police and the military pinpoint the location of gunfire, and Arcadia Power, a platform that facilitates the purchasing of renewable energy across utilities in all 50 states.
“I would do it again for twice the cost,” says Millar, 27, who paid for her $200,000 education with loans.
“Our students want to make the world go round in a different way,” says Sherryl Kuhlman, managing director of the Social Impact Initiative. Students who choose this path, she says, are no longer willing to “take a job they don’t like so they can give their money away later. They want to merge the money and the purpose.”
Business school is certainly still about getting a career boost in finance , consulting or management. But increasingly it’s also about learning to apply private sector strategies to public concerns. Dozens of schools now allow students to pursue an MBA focused on sustainability , social impact or social responsibility.
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A few schools, including the University of Vermont and Presidio Graduate School (with campuses in San Francisco and Seattle), offer formal “green MBA” curricula entirely focused on sustainability and/or social justice or responsibility. Other schools offer a standard MBA curriculum enriched with electives that allow a concentration.
The aim is to foster “tri-sector leadership” in tackling the “incredibly complex problems” where for-profit, nonprofit and government worlds intersect, says Erin Worsham, executive director of the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. The programs also typically emphasize a “triple bottom line,” defining success not just by profit realized but also by social impact and environmental sustainability.
Beyond the tailored coursework, extracurricular opportunities frequently include helping to manage social-impact investing funds; participants evaluate business proposals and award seed money to deserving social entrepreneurs. It’s also common for students to team up with corporations, government agencies or nonprofit organizations to work on problems as part of their classwork or during internships.
“I can’t stand on the sidelines,” says Thomas Crowley, 37, an architect who is pursuing a three-year joint MBA and Master of Public Administration at Presidio’s San Francisco campus. Presidio’s 200 students pursue their MBA or M .P .A . in a low-residency format, and all of the coursework is focused on the triple bottom line and sustainable business practices, says President Mark Schulman.
For example, a class in accounting might teach students how to weigh the environmental impact of a product or service in calculating its overall profitability. Crowley expects the program to allow him to focus on “human use patterns and disposability in our society.” Its structure lets him work to cover his living expenses, and he’s financing the $99,000 tuition with loans.
[Learn about paying for graduate school.]
Students can easily sample socially responsible practices without committing to a focused degree or concentration. At Haas School of Business at the University of California–Berkeley, roughly 80 percent of MBA students get at least some exposure through the Center for Social Sector Leadership.
Ben Mangan, the center’s executive director, co-teaches one popular course that’s a launch pad for social-impact startups. One student team created a marketplace where disabled people can find caregivers; another developed a platform to connect small and medium-sized businesses with low-cost recycling collectors.
Lyndsey Wilson, 26, describes herself as a “social-impact lifer” who was drawn to the MBA program at Haas because of its reach into the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial and investing ecosystem. Wilson worked after college for an attorney who helps immigrants and the homeless, then did a stint at the Gates Foundation studying health problems in the developing world.
[Read four tips on choosing the right business school for social entrepreneurship.]
“I just want to understand how it all works,” she says. Haas awarded Wilson a fellowship that covers most of her tuition, and she has taken out loans for the balance of her costs.
Wilson says she may pay off her loans by spending at least a few years in the private sector. Or if she pursues her ambition of entering the nonprofit world, she’ll take advantage of the Haas policy of subsidizing loan payments for graduates who opt for public service.
Varying degrees of loan forgiveness or subsidy are often available for b-school grads who take government or nonprofit jobs. If you think a social-impact business degree might be right for you otherwise, loan forgiveness or assistance may make it a practical financial choice as well.
This story is excerpted from the U.S. News “Best Graduate Schools 2018” guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
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