<p>Being realistic, an undergrad at Northwestern will have very little contact with the Decision Science department at Kellogg (they are the crazy technical people) or any other Kellogg department really. This is really not much of a drawback for an undergraduate wanting a corporate or consulting career, though. It’s the exact same position as most students from elite undergraduate programs. A business program is a little bit on the “vocational training” most of the time, and plainly that is a big part of the reason why undergraduate business programs are almost (not entirely) nonexistent at elite private universities. </p>
<p>At Northwestern or any other good school without a business program, you just need to make sure you get plenty of training in quantitative and analytical methods. Northwestern has some very appealing versions of this, eg, the Math Methods in Social Science program I mentioned in the other Northwestern business thread. You might also grab a few business skills courses like accounting, and take some stuff on organizational behavior. Very few undergrad business programs can match the quality of those offerings at Northwestern for undergraduates.</p>
<p>The main question then is whether employers know how to interpret the lack of business school certification for a Northwestern (etc.) graduate, and whether MBA programs know how to interpret it in the future. Of course the answer is yes, they do know because they see this kind of thing all the time.</p>
<p>So, the business training comparison really does not clearly favor a school simply because it has an undergraduate business degree. An obvious exception is accounting, which is still something of a vocational training program in part anyway. But generally presence of a program in business per se is a myopic way to choose.</p>