How and Why Wharton Business School became World Topper – A Case Study on Organizational Quest for Excellence of First US Business School

Abstract

After accepting quality higher education as service, many global business schools are competing to attract intelligent students to various innovative courses and by training them to become further smart, providing better challenging placements in the corporate sector with lucrative salaries. Such schools competing globally by differentiating their education model through top-level infrastructure, globally competitive faculty member, providing industry oriented and research-based curriculum, customized curriculum and teaching methods through providing a choice from an infinite number of electives, and competence based examination and evaluation system. Recent ranking results announced by the USA based Elsevier’s SSRN identified Wharton Business School of the University of Pennsylvania, USA as Ranked ONE business school in the world in terms of its number of annual research paper publications. Wharton’s 235-plus professors are one of the largest, most published faculties at any business school. The standing and affiliated faculty members of WBS work within and collaborate across 10 academic departments. For 2019 outgoing MBA batch, the school admitted 863 students from 65 countries out of 6,692 applicants. In this paper, we have analysed the operational and business strategy of Wharton business school in its quest for excellence and courage to innovate decisions on academic performance and research performance and compared with its competitors in the same country like Booth School of Business, Harvard B-School, Stanford Graduate B-School, Stern B-School, Columbia B-School, and Sloan B-School.