About Wharton SF

Connected Strategy: Building Continuous Customer Relationships for Competitive Advantage

World-Class Facility

Wharton San Francisco‘s West Coast facility is located in the historic Hills Brothers Plaza at the base of the Bay Bridge, overlooking the San Francisco Bay.

Wharton San FranciscoThe campus relocated to Hills Plaza in 2011 as part of a broader strategic emphasis by Wharton to expand its presence on the West Coast. The new campus at Hills Plaza is 30 percent larger than Wharton San Francisco’s previous space to accommodate planned growth in Wharton’s MBA Program for Executives, increased activity by Wharton Executive Education and Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, and continued emphasis on speakers, panels, programs and events that showcase Wharton, its faculty, and its students and alumni.

The move to Hills Plaza coincided with the 10-year anniversary of the establishment of Wharton San Francisco. Since its inception, the West Coast campus has awarded more than 800 MBA degrees while also affirming its role as a center of alumni life for the 12,000 Wharton graduates on the West Coast.

MBA Program for Executives

Established in 2001, Wharton’s MBA Program for Executives at Wharton San Francisco has about 200 students, most of whom are employed while they take on the academic challenges of the 24-month program. Because it is an “executive” program, the average age is 34 or 35, and each student enters the program with 10 years or more of management experience. On graduation, students earn a full MBA degree at the end of the 2-year program—except for the scheduling, the MBA program in San Francisco is identical to the MBA program that Wharton offers to its full-time students in Philadelphia. Students in the program benefit from the collective knowledge of top Wharton faculty as well as the experiences and perspectives of an incredibly talented group of peers in a collaborative environment. Wharton’s MBA Program for Executives, in Philadelphia and San Francisco, is consistently ranked in the top 3 among competing programs in the United States.

Semester in San Francisco

The Wharton School provides the opportunity for a select group of MBA students in Philadelphia’s full-time program to spend the fall semester of their second year taking classes in San Francisco. Residence in San Francisco can be extended by combining it with a summer internship in a Bay-Area company to provide a June through December experience. The Semester in San Francisco combines classroom instruction with extracurricular activities and various kinds of engagement with the regional economy to create a cohesive educational experience.

Coast-to-Coast Cisco Telepresence

In February 2013, Wharton and Cisco launched a state-of-the-art Telepresence solution for the classroom. This system — installed in both Philadelphia and San Francisco — offers the possibility of connecting classrooms on both campuses for some very interesting use cases. A presenter on either coast can place a Telepresence call to the other classroom and appear life-sized on a large drop-down screen in the front of the class. In the rear of both classrooms, two large screens show the students in the remote room. The audio and video are seamless and instantaneous, and there are mechanisms for sharing slides and other content via the system as well.