EGADE Business School - History

History

The earliest forerunner of the school was founded on 1 September 1964 as Escuela de Graduados en Administración (Graduate School of Management), a small department attached to the Monterrey Campus of the Monterrey Institute of Technology (ITESM). The project was funded partially through a US$ 410,000 grant from the Ford Foundation, which at the time was an active promoter of Alliance for Progress, John F. Kennedy’s initiative to sponsor economic and social development in Latin America and counterbalance Communist influence in the region, particularly in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Similar agreements — aiming to provide "advanced training for faculty members from business schools in emerging countries"— had previously helped the creation of the Getulio Vargas Foundation of Brazil (1954), ESAN in Peru (1962), and INCAE (originally in Nicaragua, 1964).

In its first year the school was offering a single master’s degree in Management (Maestría en Administración) to 17 full-time and 37 part-time students. By 1968 it had 395, including several students from the United States, three from the Netherlands and 41 non-Mexican Latin Americans. The short-lived institution, however, would be disbanded in 1970s, when ITESM restructured itself and centralized most of its academic departments around academic divisions. Within such arrangements, its master’s degree was transferred to a centrally managed Program for Graduates in Management (Programa de Graduados en Administración, PGA), awarded directly by the Institute.

The program managed to survive the mid-1980s, when it was forced to slash its matriculation in half as many Latin American economies plunged into high inflation and unemployment and regional companies struggled to support its personnel through postgraduate education. Nevertheless, in the next decade most of the region recovered, the Institute readopted its original organizational model, and in 1995 the first Graduate School of Business Administration and Leadership (Escuela de Graduados en Administración y Dirección de Empresas, EGADE) was founded as an appendage institution of the Monterrey Campus.

The model followed by what was then known as EGADE Monterrey brought early successes, as the institute invested significant resources and barely ten years after its foundation its MBA degree was ranked in the top ten in the world by the Wall Street Journal.

Such encouraging results allowed its first director, Wharton alumnus Jaime Alonso Gómez, to become the first Latin American scholar in history to be named Dean of the Year by the Academy of International Business. It also prompted the gradual creation of homologous schools in six more campuses of the Institute; which shared the same academic curricula but, as peripheral institutions bound to local campuses, found themselves replicating organizational structures and forced to seek costly international accreditations individually. A major reorganization of postgraduate studies at ITESM in 2010 merged three out of seven into a semi-autonomous, national graduate school under a brand new name: EGADE Business School.