Carroll School of Management

What Is Carroll School of Management?

The Carroll School of Management — colloquially referred to by its acronym, “CSOM” — is the business school of Boston College. Founded in 1938 and located in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, the school offers both undergraduate and graduate programs.

The school is well-known for the mixture of business and liberal arts education offered by its undergraduate program. In January 2020, it was rated as the 49th-best business school in the United States by Bloomberg Businessweek.

How Carroll School of Management Works

Previously known as the College of Business Administration, CSOM received its current name in 1989, in recognition of a $10 million naming gift given by the businessman and philanthropist Wallace E. Carroll, who had previously attended the school.

Today, CSOM is home to about 2,200 undergraduate students as well as about 900 graduate students. They are joined by nearly 150 full-time faculty members, with expertise in areas such as accounting, business law, asset management, marketing, strategy, supply chain management, and sustainability, among others.

CSOM’s undergraduate programs are known for providing students with a foundation of liberal-arts education to complement their core business curriculum. In the long term, CSOM’s management believes that this breadth of exposure will help their graduates to be more broad-minded and adaptable in their future workplace and leadership roles. For those pursuing graduate education, CSOM also offers both a full-time and part-time Master of Business Administration (MBA) programs.

Real World Example of Carroll School of Management

In 2020, CSOM was cited as the 13th-best undergraduate business school by the popular b-school ranking publication, Poets & Quants. In this same study, CSOM was also ranked in first place for the quality of its teaching. This was based partly on positive feedback received from CSOM undergraduate alumni, who were asked whether they would recommend the program to others. 

Supporting this positive reputation among CSOM graduates are the strong employment statistics that the school has shown in recent years. For the Class of 2019, for instance, 94% of CSOM undergraduates were employed within four months of graduation, with average starting salaries of over $71,000.

With tuition of roughly $55,000 per year, CSOM’s full-time MBA graduates saw an average starting compensation of approximately $120,000. Approximately 90% of students had internship placements for the summer of 2020. For the class of 2020, financial services and technology were the most popular industries for CSOM’s MBA grads, each being chosen by almost a quarter of the class.