Michigan Ross is part of the public university located in Ann Arbor, an archetypal university town and with sporting traditions focused around a college football stadium which holds more than 107,000 people.
Founded in 1924, it moved to its present location on campus in 1948, although its facilities have been transformed since 2004 by successive donations from alumnus Stephen Ross, whose initial gift of $100 million, then the largest to any business school and leading to it adopting his name, has been followed by subsequent endowments amounting to a further $150 million. Facilities include a Behavioural Lab and a collection of 250 contemporary works of art which are distributed around the school.
Core values, and in particular a positive view of business, are summed up in its slogan of "we develop leaders who make a positive difference to the world". It has been driven by a curriculum based on "action" or "experiential" learning and claims that “no other MBA program can equal our hands-on opportunities to start, advise, lead and invest in real-world businesses,” since 1990. A part-time online MBA will be offered from 2019.
Its highly-regarded undergraduate degree was opened for the first time in 2017 to first-year students, and a module on “Sustainable Business in Iceland” rated among the 20 most interesting offered by any business school in 2018.
Staff and student start-ups have been backed by the Wolverine Venture Fund since 1997. A Social Venture Fund was added in 2009.
