Master of Business Administration: Coursera

Stuart School of Business is a global leader in bridging technology and business, offering distinctive education that provides students with the knowledge and skillsets to become outstanding professionals.

Business at Illinois Tech has a prestigious history that dates back to the late 1800s, with some of the nation’s first courses in “Home Economics” and “Household Management” being offered by the Lewis Institute, Stuart’s original home, and the Institute’s subsequent formation of the Department of Business and Economics in 1926. Combined with the merger of the Lewis Institute with the Armour Institute and the earlier pioneering works of Philip D. Armour, a merchant financier, Julia A. Beveridge, a librarian turned public administrator, and Frank W. Gunsaulus, an entrepreneurial preacher in the 1880s, the Department Business and Economics ultimately grew into a separate school at Illinois Institute of Technology – the Stuart School of Business, in 1969, with a gift from Lewis Institute alum and renowned financier Harold Leonard Stuart. Harold L. Stuart himself was a national leader in the field of investment banking in the first half of the 20th century, and his Chicago investment bank played a pivotal role in establishing the city as a global financial hub.

Over a period of more than 125 years, harnessing curricular innovations by Julia A. Beveridge and George N. Carman, and incredible scholarly works by trailblazing Illinois Tech scholars Herb A. Simon (author of Administrative Behavior, later awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics), Karl Menger (developer of the St. Petersburg paradox in economics) and Abe Sklar (developer of the Copula in financial modeling), the Stuart School of Business has refined education in the disciplines of economics, finance, analytics, business and public administration, marketing, and management.

A long-standing leader in curricular innovation, in 1990, building on the foundational works of numerous Illinois Tech scholars, and Harold L. Stuart’s own contributions to finance and the broader business community, the Stuart School of Business established quantitative finance as an academic discipline, with a world’s first postgraduate Master’s program in Financial Markets and Trading – a program that highlighted a new model for embedding into a postgraduate academic program the emphases on career readiness and connectedness with the business community, and transformed business school education.

Today, the Stuart School of Business continues to be a frontier innovator in accredited education, offering academic programs and co-curricular opportunities that place students on the path to self-actualization and career success. Leadership, entrepreneurship, experiential learning, positive societal impact, and connectedness to the business community, combined with a human-centered approach to student development, and an unyielding focus on student success, continue to be core pillars of the MBA programs at Stuart. Stuart is accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) – an accreditation achieved by fewer than 6% of business schools worldwide.

Stuart offers its innovative Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs on Coursera, including the MBA, the MBA (Business Analytics), and the MBA (Quantitative Finance), all of which require the successful completion of 36 credit hours and share the same set of core courses comprising 24 credit hours, with the remaining 12 credit hours in students' chosen program specialization. Performance-based admission pathways are available to students by completing an initial set of 3 courses. The Stuart MBA programs on Coursera emphasize flexibility, with students able to complete their program of choice at their own pace. The programs also highlight stackability, with students eligible to receive Stuart academic certificates along their path to degree completion, as they complete sequences of courses. 

The courses below provide the curriculum for the MBA. The curricula for the other MBA pathways require a specific set of courses in lieu of the electives below, though they share the same set of core courses.

Curriculum