Academics at Chicago
What Booth Is Known For
Flexible curriculum. The hallmark of the Chicago Booth experience is its flexible curriculum. Chicago Booth affords students a wide degree of choice. The entire program requires only one class, and that class is LEAD, for Leadership Effectiveness and Development. Booth still trains graduates in the “language of business”; finance, statistics, and accounting are the tools of the trade. However, students have significant control over the level of difficulty they tackle and even the slant or orientation of approach from which they study these topics based on a menu of courses that are designed to let them choose how to prepare for their future careers.
Finance. A guide about Chicago Booth would never get very far without talking about finance. The emphasis on finance and economics at Chicago Booth is world-renowned. The school claims that modern finance was born there in the 1960s, when Merrill Lynch asked for computing help in a project to analyze 50 years of historical stock prices. This project became what is now the Center for Research in Security Prices, a source of not only data to academic and commercial institutions around the world, but also revenue for Chicago Booth. It has not just one, but two concentrations related to finance: Finance and Analytic Finance—plus two more involving economics: Economics, and Econometrics and Statistics.
The Chicago School. What, Chicago Booth is known for a totally different school? Not exactly. The “Chicago School of Economics” isn’t a bricks-and-mortar school; rather, it’s a school of thought, subscribing to the free markets theories popularized by Milton Friedman, who was a prime influence on Ronald Reagan’s economic policy in the 1980s. Or, as the actual Economics Department explains it, “The unifying thread in all this is not political or ideological but methodological, the methodological conviction that economics is an incomparably powerful tool for understanding society.”
