Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick (RBS) was founded in Newark in 1929 as the Seth Boyden School of Business. It opened its doors at 40 Rector Street in space shared with the New Jersey Law School and Dana College (now Rutgers' School of Law-Newark and Faculty of Arts and Sciences-Newark, respectively). The school offered one degree-a bachelor of science in business administration.

In 1934, Seth Boyden became part of the newly formed University of Newark and was renamed the School of Business Administration. AACSB accreditation was granted in 1941, and in 1946 it and the other University of Newark colleges became part of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.

RBS launched its master of business administration degree program in the fall of 1950 and a master`s degree in public accounting--the first of its kind in the country--in 1956. The graduate student population quickly exceeded the undergraduate, and the school, in a move that mirrored a trend in business education at the time, decided in 1961 to discontinue the undergraduate program and concentrate exclusively on graduate education. A new name--Graduate School of Management--reflected the change.

With its new focus, RBS continued to grow and innovate. The creation in 1970-71 of the Interfunctional Management program, an M.B.A. fieldwork course sequence in which teams of student consultants work on real problems for real companies, was another first for higher education in the United States. By the program's 30th anniversary in 2001, more than 1,500 projects had been completed for some 700 organizations. It has been widely imitated by other business schools.

While the Interfunctional Management program catered predominantly to large, more established corporations, the school expanded its outreach to small companies and entrepreneurs with the establishment of the New Jersey Small Business Development Center (NJSBDC) in 1977. The center--a partnership between RBS and the U.S. Small Business Administration--is the result of an act of Congress (Public Law 96-302) that called for the creation of a pilot network of state-based small business development centers. Headquartered in Newark, the NJSBDC offers counseling and training that help small business owners finance, manage, and market their companies. Today it has 11 full-service regional centers and 20 affiliate offices serving all 21 of New Jersey's counties.

In 1978, the  Ph.D. program in management, administered by Rutgers and taught in conjunction with the New Jersey Institute of Technology, was added to the curricula. It was modeled on the structure of a traditional Ph.D. program, with prescribed core courses, elective courses, preliminary exams, dissertation, and final defense, and is now one of the largest doctoral programs in management in the country.

In 1980, RBS launched an Executive M.B.A. program for middle-level managers who want to earn their degrees on a full-time basis while working full time. Meeting on alternating Fridays and Saturdays throughout the school year and in four "residency" weeks during 20 months, the carefully selected students study subjects at a higher level and more intensively than is possible in the regular M.B.A. courses. International Executive M.B.A. programs in Asia followed a decade later. The I.E.M.B.A. degree is currently offered in Beijing and Shanghai, China.

While undergraduate degrees in the broad functional areas of businesses had been available on the New Brunswick campus since 1934, Rutgers took the step toward having an official undergraduate program in New Brunswick in 1981 when it organized several departments into the School of Administrative Services under the Faculty of Professional Studies. In June 1984, the university`s Board of Governors approved a reorganization of the School of Administrative Services into the School of Business-New Brunswick. The new school received final approval from the New Jersey Department of Higher Education in February 1986 and began operating on September 1 of that year. Its mission was "to provide a high quality, upper-division program of study for students wishing to pursue professional careers . . . (and) prepare the student for imaginative and responsible citizenship and leadership roles in business and society."

Since the sixties, undergraduate business education in Newark had been offered through the Faculty of Arts and Sciences-Newark and University College-Newark. That changed in 1993 when the university's Board of Governors created the Rutgers-Newark School of Management, an upper-division school (four-year program for students entering fall 2000 and beyond) with a mission "to offer contemporary programs . . . to students who are broadly educated in the liberal arts . . . to equip graduates to enter the workforce as skilled professionals . . . and lead rich lives appreciative of their cultural heritage."

At the same time, the Board of Governors merged the Departments of Business Administration and Accounting and the faculty of the Graduate School of Management to form the Faculty of Management (FOM). FOM was initially given responsibility for management education on the undergraduate level in Newark and on the graduate level in Newark and New Brunswick. In 1995, the School of Business-New Brunswick was also put under the auspices of the Faculty of Management.

In the fall of 2001, the FOM label was officially dropped in favor of Rutgers Business School-Newark and New Brunswick. The names of the schools were also changed. Rutgers Business School: Undergraduate-Newark replaced School of Management; Rutgers Business School: Undergraduate-New Brunswick replaced School of Business-New Brunswick; and Rutgers Business School: Graduate Programs-Newark and New Brunswick replaced Graduate School of Management.

Today Rutgers Business School: Graduate Programs-Newark and New Brunswick has an international reputation for teaching and research excellence.