The (Business) World According to Julian Schuster

Hamline was founded in 1854, making it Minnesota’s first college; it also was one of the first coeducational institutions in the United States. Affiliated with the United Methodist Church, Hamline offers 37 different baccalaureate majors and master’s-level degrees in four discrete graduate schools.

The St. Paul campus, where all of the university’s 2,000 undergraduate students and the majority of the 2,500-plus graduate students spend their time, is an academic “village” along Snelling Avenue north of University Avenue. There’s also a small satellite facility in St. Louis Park. There Hamline offers mostly evening and weekend courses for graduate business students.

Hamline is consistently ranked among the top Midwestern master’s-degree institutions—that is, those that confer fewer than 30 doctoral degrees per academic year—by U.S. News and World Report. It was ranked number 9 in 2008, the number-one university in that category in Minnesota. Hamline also appears in U.S. News’s “Great Schools, Great Prices” section, where colleges and universities are judged in terms of the dollar value for the quality of the education. Hamline makes much of its low faculty to student ratio (13 to 1), the warm environment of its small campus, and the breadth of liberal arts offerings taught by tenure-track professors.

Hamline has been rolling along quite nicely for a little over a century and a half, in recent years providing educations to roughly 4,600 students annually. But beginning in 2007, the university launched a five-year strategic plan designed to both raise its rankings and national profile and attract more students, particularly high achievers on secondary-school and college placement tests. Objectives also include building the Hamline University endowment to $120 million in order to provide more financial aid, and expanding the graduate-level offerings—these are currently in management, liberal studies, and education—to complement existing and emerging undergraduate-degree programs.

As part of this initiative, the Graduate School of Management has become the Hamline School of Business, which now comprises both undergraduate and graduate majors and programs. The school offers bachelor’s degrees in economics and business administration, with concentrations in finance, marketing, management, general business, and international business. Besides MBAs, the school offers master’s degrees in public administration and nonprofit management, as well as a PhD in public administration. Its goal is to increase its graduate enrollment from about 485 to 600, and its undergraduate enrollment from 230 to 500, over the next several years.

“Hamline is repositioning from a small liberal arts university to a comprehensive one,” Schuster says. “One of the pillars of that change is the formation of the School of Business, which will become a premier provider of business education. And it will be different from any other program in our region.”