Tuck School of Business: The World's First

The small brick school tucked into the Dartmouth campus has a claim that business schools around the world still argue about: it was the first graduate school of management on earth.

The Tuck School of Business opened in nineteen hundred, founded through the vision of Dartmouth president William Jewett Tucker and the generosity of a financier named Edward Tuck. Tucker had been thinking about what business leadership really meant. He believed that commerce was becoming too large and too consequential to be left to people trained only in law or classical letters. He envisioned something new: a graduate school that would bring the rigor of professional education to business and finance.

Edward Tuck, a Dartmouth alumnus who had made his fortune as a banker in Paris and as an investor in American railroads, agreed. He endowed the school and named it for his father, Amos Tuck, a New Hampshire congressman who had been one of the founders of the Republican Party in the eighteen fifties.

The school awarded the first master's degree in business administration in the world. It was tiny, a handful of students in a small New Hampshire town, but the concept spread rapidly. Harvard Business School followed in nineteen oh eight, and within a generation the MBA had become the standard credential for corporate America. The Tuck model, a graduate-only program emphasizing general management rather than narrow specialization, remains influential today.

Tuck stayed small by design. Unlike the giant MBA factories that followed, Tuck has admitted only around three hundred students per class, creating a tight residential community in Hanover. Critics have called this exclusivity; proponents call it the point. Either way, the school that invented the MBA still graduates fewer students per year than some high schools.