University of Washington: Foster

Founded in 1917, and retitled in 2007, the Michael G. Foster School of Business is the business school at the University of Washington, Seattle.

The school, based over five campus sites in Seattle and one in Kirkland, currently has a roll of around 2,500 students in its undergraduate and graduate programmes. There are also about 1,000 professionals involved in its executive education seminars and lifelong learning programmes.

The course offerings at the Foster School of Business include an undergraduate degree in business, and a full-time master of business administration (MBA) programme, global executive MBA programme, evening MBA, executive MBA, hybrid MBA (online program), technology management MBA and a doctoral program. The school also offers one-year master's programmes in entrepreneurship, accounting, information systems and supply chain management.

The Foster School hosts a number of dynamic research centres. They include The Arthur W. Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship; the Center for Leadership and Strategic Thinking; the Center for Sales and Marketing Strategy; and the Global Business Center which develops international business programmes in conjunction with the United States Department of Education.

The Foster School of Business has received a number of excellent ranking positions from Bloomberg Businessweek, The Financial Times and Academic Analytics. Perhaps the most intriguing measure of the school’s success has come from its own survey that found that nearly 3,000 of its alumni-founded companies have created 300,000 new jobs and $82 billion in annual revenue nationally.

Notable alumni include: Richard Roll, American economist; William S. Ayer, president and CEO of Alaska Airlines; Donald Bren, Chairman of the Irvine Company; Andrew Brimmer, the first African American to serve as governor of the Federal Reserve System; Yoshihiko Miyauchi, chairman and CEO of Japanese financial services group ORIX Corp and Bruce Nordstrom, former chairman and CEO of Nordstrom.