Stories
Stories
What Keeps HBS Ahead? You Do!
My pitch for giving is simple. HBS is a human capital–intensive business. Our product is knowledge that informs leadership, and that product depends on talent and innovation capital. We invest strategically, with the aim of keeping HBS at the top. In a zero-profit model, our greatest challenges are providing a transformational education for our students and funding the great ideas of our faculty.
Faculty are drawn to HBS by its distinctive research and teaching opportunities. Their work drives our educational programs, fuels Harvard Business Review, and informs HBS cases used worldwide. Our unique funding model makes this possible. Because research is funded internally, faculty enjoy greater academic freedom. It’s expensive, but the payoff—in the recruitment of stellar faculty and in the impact of their work—differentiates us.
Students come to HBS for academic excellence, renowned faculty, and campus resources. Many are surprised to learn that the MBA Program runs a deficit, but it’s true. The resources needed to deliver best-in-class learning outstrip tuition. We rely on revenue from Executive Education, Publishing, and our endowment to supplement the cost of delivering the program. This revenue covers the basics, but in many cases, the work that ensures the School’s continued leadership—developing new courses, undertaking pathbreaking research, creating the Harvard Innovation Lab—depends on new gifts.
The bottom line is that the School needs annual support to maintain its excellence. If we didn’t receive alumni gifts each year, we couldn’t fund emerging needs, ensure our faculty’s academic freedom, or continue to influence and enhance management education around the world. In this effort, gifts of all sizes make a difference.
William A. Sahlman (MBA ’75, PhDBE ’82) Senior Associate Dean for External Relations Dimitri V. D’Arbeloff–MBA Class of 1955 Professor of Business Administration
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