The McCombs School of Business (McCombs School or McCombs) is a business school at The University of Texas at Austin, a public research university in Austin, Texas. In addition to the main campus in Downtown Austin, McCombs offers classes outside Central Texas in Dallas, and Houston. The McCombs School of Business offers undergraduate, master's, and doctoral programs for their average 13,000 students each year, adding to its 98,648 member alumni base from a variety of business fields. In addition to traditional classroom degree programs, McCombs is home to 14 collaborative research centers, the international business plan competition: Venture Labs Investment Competition (formerly known as "MOOT Corp"), and executive education programs.
McCombs is also the oldest public business school in Texas.
History
The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) was founded in 1883, and the university's School of Business Administration was established a few decades later in 1922. The school quickly grew, establishing a Master in Professional Accounting program in 1948 and offering its first executive education programs in 1955.
Effects of the 1990s technology boom and dot-com bubble were palpable in Austin, leaving the nickname "Silicon Hills" on the city. One McCombs School program that has capitalized on this is the Venture Labs Investment Competition, is the oldest operating inter-business school new-venture competition in the world. Begun in 1984, it has been dubbed the "Super Bowl of world business plan competitions." Also opportunistic was the creation of the school's first Management Information Systems degree in 1990. The MBA Investment Fund, LLC was also founded in 1994, becoming the first legally constituted investment fund run by Master of Business Administration (MBA) students and proving quite successful, with a 17.5 percent annual return to date. Additionally, in 1995 the college became the first to require students have an e-mail address.
On May 11, 2000, an auto dealership owner Red McCombs announced a $50 million donation to UT Austin. In his honor, the College of Business Administration and the Graduate School of Business were merged under the newly created Red McCombs School of Business.
In June 2007, AT&T pledged $25 million to the McCombs School towards the construction of the Executive Education and Conference Center. As part of the financial contribution, the center, which opened August 2008, will be named the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center for the next 25 years.
Facilities
The McCombs School of Business is located in the heart of the University of Texas at Austin campus. The majority of the McCombs School is housed in a three-building complex called the George Kozmetsky Center for Business Education, named after philanthropist and former College of Business Administration dean, George Kozmetsky, at the intersection of 21st and Speedway Streets. The McCombs School is bordered by Waggener Hall (the former home of the College of Business Administration) to the North, Gregory Gymnasium, and E. P. Schoch Building (one of the last overseen by campus master planner Paul Cret) to the East and is adjacent to Perry–Castañeda Library to the south.
The Business-Economics Building (now the College of Business Administration Building), opened in January 1962. It was the largest classroom structure on campus when it was built and housed the first escalator on campus. Today, it is home to the undergraduate programs at the McCombs School and the Bureau of Business Research. The building faces Speedway Street and unlike the majority of surrounding Mediterranean Revival Style architecture structures, most of the building is faced with brick.
In March 1976, Graduate School of Business Building opened next to the existing building facing 21st Street. Since its inception, the addition to the College of Business Administration Building houses the separate graduate MBA program. The addition was constructed in a rhombus shape to protect a grove of trees on the north side of the building.
Located on the southwest corner of the UT campus, the AT&T Executive Education and Conference Center is a multi-function complex and hotel. The facility has multiple sized classrooms and breakout rooms, a 300-seat amphitheater, ballroom, three restaurants, and 297 hotel rooms. The center hosts all of the executive education programs for the McCombs School, including the Texas Executive Education and evening MBA programs. It is the first building to be built to the U.S. Green Building Council's LEED Silver certification standards on campus.