Overview
McCombs Mission, Vision, and Values
Welcome to the McCombs School of Business at The University of Texas at Austin. Our mission is to educate the business leaders of tomorrow while creating knowledge that has a critical significance for industry and society. You play a pivotal role in the school’s ability to fulfill this mission. Through innovative curriculum, excellent teaching, cutting-edge research, and involvement with industry, the school brings together the highest quality faculty and students to provide the best educational programs and graduates of any public business school. We are proud of what we have accomplished, and excited about what lies ahead, with your participation and support.
Dedication to diversity
We believe that to prepare students to become leaders in our very diverse, multicultural society, it is essential that they have the opportunity to become involved with students whose backgrounds differ from their own. To facilitate such an involvement the school wants to have a culturally and racially diverse student body.
Seeking excellence at a national and regional level
The McCombs School seeks to be a national player in business education, producing graduates who are sought by companies across the country and around the world. As the only major business school in the region, the school has a central role to play in the economy of our nation. Yet, we also recognize that Texas is a very important state in our national economy and is the home to many leading firms (45 of the companies that make up the Fortune 500 are headquartered in Texas, the third largest number of any state in the nation). The school intends to embrace its Texas roots while expanding its reach worldwide.
The goal of the McCombs School is to become the best public business school in the nation. Such a school attracts and retains the best faculty, recruits the highest quality student body and produces graduates that satisfy the needs of the finest employers and corporate partners. Such a school is an incubator of new ideas while instilling in its students an appreciation of diversity and an ethical framework for future business decisions.
Read more about McCombs Strategic Plan
A balanced focus on five fundamental disciplines
To become the best public business school, the school must excel in the five fundamental business disciplines—accounting, finance, information systems, management, and marketing. These academic disciplines serve as the foundation of business education and no business school can lead unless it has top faculty in each of these core fields. To distinguish the McCombs School from other leading business schools, we will create differentiating academic initiatives in each discipline and across these disciplines, initiatives that will have strong relationships with important firms and industries. To enhance our academic programs and our research agenda, we will also develop strong capabilities in the supporting discipline of quantitative methods while taking advantage of any special opportunities available to the school in the enriching academic fields of entrepreneurship and global business.
Six core values across the University, plus two
The University of Texas at Austin has identified six core values for the University as a whole:
- Learning—a caring community, all of us students, helping one another grow.
- Discovery—expanding knowledge and human understanding.
- Freedom—to seek the truth and express it.
- Leadership—the will to excel with integrity and the spirit that nothing is impossible.
- Individual Opportunity—many options, diverse people and ideas, one University.
- Responsibility—to serve as a catalyst for positive change in Texas and beyond.
The McCombs School adopts these six values as fundamental to business education. Only through learning and discovery can the school fulfill its basic mission of educating tomorrow's business leaders and producing the new ideas that will affect business practice. Leadership and responsibility are traits that we want to build in our students, and only through freedom and individual opportunity can our students develop their intellectual capabilities to the fullest.
The school recognizes two additional values as part of its core mission:
- Competitive Spirit—a desire to succeed and make a difference.
- Ethical Behavior—recognizing and acting on an ethical framework that governs business and personal behavior.
We want our students and faculty to share a competitive spirit to excel and perform at a high level. We relish the entrepreneurial drive that is part of the Texas culture. At the same time, we view ethics as an intensely relevant aspect of business practice. We expect students in all disciplines to explore the complex ethical issues that are vital to the long-term health of organizations, and we are committed to helping students develop a sound ethical foundation for their business careers.
About the McCombs School of Business
One of the largest and most distinguished business schools in the country, The University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business is dedicated to educating the business leaders of tomorrow while creating knowledge of critical significance for industry and society. With strength in all major business disciplines, the school is especially known for a strong record of job placements in finance, consulting, and marketing, and for innovative programs in technology, management, and accounting.
Particular distinctions include:
- The MBA Investment Fund, L.L.C., the first legally constituted, private investment company entirely managed by students.
- Moot Corp®, the original and most lucrative student business plan competition in the world.
- The Plus Program, an innovative series of MBA seminars focusing on the skills of communication, leadership, and teamwork.
- Market-driven specializations responding to evolving industry needs in energy finance, private equity, real estate finance, customer insight, supply chain management, and other areas.
- Collaboration with business through 16 research centers including the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce, the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship, and the Center for Customer Insight.
- National academic leadership in all major fields of business education.
- Diversity, with the highest percentage of tenured minority faculty at any top business school and a #1 ranking for Hispanic business students.
- Austin, a thriving high-tech center that's still a wonderful place to live.
McCombs educates more than 6500 students each year, creating one of the largest cumulative impacts of any business school in the world. Approximately two thousand professionals also participate each year in programs designed for working executives and their firms. The school has more than 79,000 alumni. Prominent graduates include Gerard Arpey, Chairman, President and CEO, AMR Corp. and American Airlines; U.S. Secretary of Commerce Don Evans; Kenneth Jastrow II, Chairman and CEO of Temple-Inland Inc; William Johnson, Chairman, President and CEO of H. J. Heinz Co.; James Mulva, Chairman and CEO of ConocoPhillips; Gary Kelley, CEO of Southwest Airlines; and John Wilder, CEO of TXU.
In 2000, Red McCombs, self-made businessman and co-founder of Clear Channel Communications, invested $50 million in the future of the school with what was then the largest gift in the history of the University. In recognition of his gift, the UT System Board of Regents recommended the renaming of the school in his honor.
Historically regarded as the strongest business school in the Southwest and now becoming more nationally recognized, the school, under new dean George W. Gau, has set a goal of becoming the top public business school in the nation.
Student Enrollment
Students: 5,896
- 4,183 undergraduate
- 1,601 graduate
- 112 doctoral
Faculty: 169 full-time equivalent
Alumni: 79,201 in 50 states, and 100 countries
Degree Programs: 10
- 4,183 Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA)
- 589 Master of Business Administration (MBA)
- 140 Texas Executive MBA
- 84 Executive MBA – Mexico City
- 105 Texas MBA at Dallas/Fort Worth
- 115 Texas MBA at Houston
- 238 Texas Evening MBA
- 607 Professional Program in Accounting (PPA)
- 138 Master in Professional Accounting (MPA)
- 112 PhD Programs
research centers
AIM Investment Center
Center for Business Decision Analysis
Center for Business, Technology & Law
Center for Customer Insight
Center for Energy Finance Education & Research
Center for International Business Education & Research
Center for Research in Electronic Commerce
Center for Risk Management & Insurance
EDS Financial Trading and Technology Center
Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship
Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst Center for Private Equity Finance
IC2 Institute
Supply Chain Management Consortium
The Real Estate Finance and Investment Center
Professorship Endowments
The McCombs faculty is the cornerstone of our academic enterprise. Composed of leading researchers and award-winning educators, this group of international scholars brings a global perspective to the classroom. Their world-class research transforms industry practice and inspires innovation in the classroom. Eight McCombs faculty members have been inducted into UT’s prestigious Academy of Distinguished Teachers, an honor accorded to just five percent of tenured faculty at the University.
Our donors support the efforts of these highly-trained educators in many ways. Privately-funded centers of excellence help our faculty fully integrate research, education and practice. By providing a rich research environment, often with close industry participation, centers support new types of research and enliven the classroom.
Gifts in support of faculty and their work provide a foundation of excellence that broadly benefits students and programs at the McCombs School. This funding allows us to provide research support for faculty over the summer months and to recruit and retain more tenure-track faculty, reduce class size and increase the rigor of our curriculum.