Georgia Tech College of Management is transitioning from offering undergraduate students a Bachelor of Science in Management (BSM) to a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration (BSBA) degree.

Current Management majors who are due to graduate after Spring 2011 are eligible to change their majors so that BSBA appears on their degree. For current Management majors interested in learning more, meetings will be held throughout the semester. For details, visit the BSBA info page.

Starting in summer 2011, all new freshmen and transfer students will be admitted to the BSBA program. The BSM will no longer be offered to new students, but current students who elect not to switch to BSBA can still finish their degrees.

The BSBA and BSM degrees have slightly different degree requirements. Students joining the BSBA degree must complete all BSBA degree requirements, including one of the newly approved business concentrations and several other courses not currently required of all BSM students.

Benefits of the BSBA include greater recognition of the degree's meaning among potential employers, says Nancy Gimbel, director of the College of Management's Undergraduate Program. "While our Management degree requirements are consistent with Business Administration degree requirements at peer institutions, the Management degree requires constant explanation to recruiters," she explains.

"Management is just one of the disciplines under the umbrella of Business Administration," Gimbel adds. "Although many decades ago our program focused on producing industrial managers, we now have fully established academic areas and concentrations in finance, accounting, marketing, organizational behavior, information technology management, operations management, law and ethics, strategic management, and general management."

Requiring BSBA graduates to complete a major concentration shows employers that they are able to compete within an area of business specialization, in addition to having gained an understanding of all the areas of business through completion of core classes, Gimbel says.

Requiring BSBA students to complete a major concentration shows employers that they are competitive for full-time positions that require depth of knowledge in one area of business. Through core courses, students will continue to gain breadth of knowledge across all areas of business.

The change to BSBA aligns the College's undergraduate program to the various Master of Business Administration degrees offered at Georgia Tech.

Georgia Tech's Undergraduate Program is currently 28^th (16^th among public universities) by U.S. News & World Report and 50^th (19^th among public universities) by Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Spring 2010 graduates had a median salary of $50,000 (versus the national business major average of $45,200). By graduation, 67 percent of students had job offers (and the percentage was 87 percent for those with intern/coop experience). The national average for students in all majors with jobs at graduation was 24.4 percent. Within Georgia Tech, the College of Management is second only to the College of Computing in terms of the job offers per student (and tied with Computing for the top signing bonus average).