Foundation and Core MBA Courses

The 30-credit master of business administration (MBA) includes a total of 10 courses. You’ll enroll in eight core courses, outlined below, along with two MBA electives of your choice.

In addition, you might be required to take specific foundation courses, also listed below, if you don’t already have equivalent undergraduate course work on your transcript. You can also view our course schedule spreadsheet for more information.

Follow the links for full course descriptions about prerequisites, requirements, and other pertinent information, and visit the full course catalog online to learn more about elective course work.

Foundation Courses

ACC 501 Financial Accounting: Covers financial accounting and external reporting from the perspective of a manager and helps develop the skills needed for interpreting financial information.

ECON 509 Survey of Economics: For those without economics at the undergraduate level, this course covers microeconomics and macroeconomics.

FIN 500  Corporation Finance: Explores the principles of financial management for nonfinancial corporations. Topics include goals of the firm; financial planning, forecasting, and control; principles of valuation; investment decisions under certainty and uncertainty; capital structure decisions and cost of capital; dividend policy; management of current assets; sources of short-term funds and security law.

ISOM 551 Operations Management: This covers the methods and models for managing operations in both service and manufacturing organizations. Topics include operations strategy, forecasting, operations planning and control, materials and inventory management, operations and staff scheduling, and quality management.

MKG 505 Survey of Marketing: Topics include the role of marketing in society as well as business, and the social, economic, and international challenges facing marketing managers.

MGT 500 Managing Organizational Behavior: This is the theory and practice of managing organizational behavior, including the functions of management, the principles of individual and group behavior, human resource management/law, quality of work-life, and ethical and social responsibility.

Mathematics: Every MBA program is quantitative in nature, and that means students need a strong background in mathematics and statistics. If you don’t have previous course work or professional experience in these areas, you might be required to take additional courses.

Core Courses for the MBA

MBA 601 Entrepreneurial Leadership: Focuses on applying leadership theories, overcoming cultural differences, and considering students’ personal ethics and decision making.

MBA 611 Statistics and Quantitative Methods: How statistics and quantitative methods help you make solid business and operations management decisions. Topics include applications of probability, hypothesis testing, analysis of variance, correlation, advanced topics in regression analysis, time series analysis and forecasting, linear programming, and simulation.

MBA 621 Information Systems: Focuses on developing and implementing enterprise information systems, and covers managerial issues associated with operations of the enterprise, the organizational impact of information systems and projects, and associated human resource issues.

MBA 631 Accounting and Decision Making: The concepts and techniques of preparing and using accounting data to plan, control, and make decisions.

MBA 651 Economic Analysis for Managers: Learn to apply economic principles to improve managerial decision making. Topics include supply and demand, marginal analysis, the impact of market structure, and the organization of the firm.

MBA 661 Managerial Finance: The perspectives and practices of financial management. Focuses on the application of analytical techniques to the firm’s short-term and long-term investment and financing decisions in a global context.

MBA 671 Marketing Management: The analysis, planning, implementation, and control of marketing programs by for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Topics include the study of pricing policies, promotion, product strategy and liability, market research, supply chain management, international issues, and consumer law.

MBA 691 Global Strategic Management or MGT 649 Entrepreneurial Strategy: In MBA 691, you'll learn to determine an organization’s long-run performance by applying business knowledge to managerial decisions and actions. Deals with legal and environmental issues, strategy formulation, and strategy implementation in a global setting. In MGT 649, you'll integrate various principles, concepts, and theories of entrepreneurship including a critical analysis of various theories and complete a major field project.