UIC College of Business Administration - College History

College History

Business courses were first offered at the University of Illinois facility at Navy Pier in 1946. The College of Business Administration (CBA) was created with the building of the original Circle Campus in 1965. The first degree was conferred the following year. Two years later, in 1968, a graduate program was established and in 1969, an MBA program was approved. The college received AACSB accreditation in 1971.

In 1982, The Circle Campus and the Medical Center were merged to form the University of Illinois at Chicago. Five years after that, a PhD program was approved for the CBA and, in 1993, the first PhD was awarded. With a donation from the Liautaud family (including James John, founder of Jimmy John's), the Liautaud Graduate School of Business was created in 2003 to unify all graduate instruction in the college.

The first research center in the CBA was the Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies, founded in 1982. The Center for Research in Information Management was established in 1988; and, the 1990s saw the founding of many other centers: the Center for Human Resource Management (1991), the Center for Urban Business (1992), the Center for Urban Real Estate (1996), and the Integritas Institute (1997). A local extension program, the Family Business Council, was also established in the 1990s (1991). The most recent center, the International Center for Futures and Derivatives, was established in 2006 through a grant from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.