10 Undergraduate Business Schools To Watch In 2025

University of Georgia Terry College of Business

So much is happening at University of Georgia Terry College of Business, it is hard to fit it all into one story.

First and foremost, on May 29, current dean Benjamin Ayers was named University of Georgia’s next senior vice president for academic affairs and provost. He will take the position on June 30, while Santanu Chatterjee, a professor and associate dean for graduate programs, will step in as interim dean.

Ayers, who holds the Earl Davis Chair in Taxation, has been at Terry since 1996 and was appointed dean in 2014. He also was director of the acclaimed J.M. Tull School of Accounting for nine years.

“Given the many opportunities and challenges facing the University of Georgia, our institution needs a proven leader and seasoned senior administrator to serve as its highest academic officer,” UGA’s President Jere W. Morehead said in an announcement. “With his experience and tremendous success as one of UGA’s longest-serving deans, Dr. Ben Ayers is ideally suited for this crucial role. I am confident that he has the background and skill set to serve as a trusted and able partner in guiding the university’s continued upward trajectory.”

During Ayers’ 11-year tenure, Terry endowed four academic units, launched a campus-wide entrepreneurship program along with several competitive degree programs, and increased undergraduate enrollment by 40%. The school also opened a new campus called the Business Learning Community with six buildings while raising $285 million to support faculty, programs, and facilities.

Of course, our 10 Business School To Watch series is all about the future, and Terry seems to have a lot to look forward to.

It rose 31 spots on our 2025 ranking of the Best Undergraduate Business Schools in the U.S. – more than any other program – finishing at No. 33. That’s on top of the 15 spots it rose in 2024.

It’s one of the first schools to offer an undergraduate certificate in AI, which will launch this fall. Students will take courses in Python, AI ethics, and other emerging topics. Through its Ivester Institute – Terry’s new interdisciplinary institute for business analytics – the school is revamping its statistics curriculum to infuse both analytics and AI tools.

Alongside 10 academic majors, students can now layer on market-driven certificates in areas like business analytics, fintech, sustainability, and music business to further specialize their degrees. The school has also boosted study away scholarships by more than $400,000 a year, looking to grow the 25% of students who study abroad for at least four weeks.

After Ayers’ highly successful tenure as dean, we’re excited to see what Terry does in its next chapter.

P&Q INTERVIEW WITH BEN AYERS

We got to connect with the outgoing dean before he steps into his new position later this month. We asked him to tell us more about what makes Terry special.

What are recent and upcoming program developments and innovations that will enhance the experience of future students?

Faculty and staff at the Terry College of Business are deeply committed to our students’ personal growth and preparing them for career success, and our students come to know that firsthand. We want our undergraduates to develop a strong work ethic, an analytical mindset, and a willingness to ask questions and solve complex problems — not just for their organizations and clients, but for their communities as well.

In addition to the 10 academic majors offered by the college, we have added several market-driven credentials and are developing more. Our students can choose to customize their educational experience by selecting to focus their skill development in one of our undergraduate certificates or “areas of emphasis.” Business analytics, FinTech, and sustainability are some of the newer ones added to our more established certificate programs in leadership, entrepreneurship, and music business. And the experiential learning opportunities run very deep in all of our programs. For instance, we have a residential living/learning community, called the Launch Pad, that is open to new undergraduates in any major who are interested in entrepreneurship and innovation.

We’re also putting a great deal of effort and resources into growing our study away programs — domestically and abroad. Currently, a quarter of our undergraduates have studied abroad for at least four weeks or longer by the time they graduate. Thanks to alumni donors, we’ve increased our annual study away scholarships awarded by over $400,000, and this number will grow significantly in the next few years with the onboarding of substantial new endowed funds. Our goal is to eliminate financial need as a barrier for students to experience international study and work.

Any other notable news coming for 2025 that readers should know?

AI Certificate: The Terry College is one of the very first business schools to set up and offer an undergraduate certificate in artificial intelligence. We’ll begin taking applications for our AI certificate this fall. It will include coursework in programming with Python, AI ethics, and electives in generative AI, machine learning, predictive analytics, and other areas. AI is a rapidly expanding force within business, and it is critically important for students to learn how to use AI tools ethically and effectively.

Ivester Institute: Our new interdisciplinary institute for business analytics is leading the development and dissemination of analytics knowledge and skills at Terry and supporting faculty research through seed grants, seminars, and acquiring proprietary data. We’re revamping our entire statistics curriculum and infusing analytics into more of our courses and combining it with the use of AI tools in the instructional model. The institute also staffs a dedicated Analytics Lab that gives students a place to learn methods and techniques that may not fit into traditional classrooms.

What are your program’s two biggest differentiators from other top undergraduate business programs? How do these prepare students for their careers?

Student Services: I believe we are well ahead of other universities in not just the quantity but also the quality of student success resources and networking opportunities available to our undergraduate students. Counting intended business majors, our undergraduate enrollment is more than 9,000 students. We support that many students with both a campus-wide Career Center and, at the college level, an Office of Undergraduate Student Services. Each of these units is staffed with student engagement and employer relations professionals who can serve a student body of that size and coordinate multiple events daily — from meet-and-greets and information sessions to alumni panels, site visits, interview prep, and on and on.

Double Dawgs: Another differentiator is UGA’s Double Dawgs programs. It allows students to earn both a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in five years or less, saving them time and improving their competitive position in the job market. We have over 30 Double Dawgs programs in the Terry College, and more than 100 across the university. Students can take graduate-level coursework — up to 12 credit hours that counts toward both degrees — during the final year of their bachelor’s program.

What separates your graduates from other business school graduates?

Experiential Learning: Hands-on experiential learning is not just encouraged at the Terry College, it’s a requirement for all undergraduates to engage in at least one approved experiential opportunity before graduation. Semester-long projects that connect our students with groups outside of the university are often the most meaningful to them, whether that’s summer internships or consulting projects for businesses and nonprofit organizations. Service learning is at the heart of this initiative, too. Our Institute for Leadership Advancement organizes more than 30 student-led projects every year that directly impact underserved communities, and that’s just a sampling of the 200 or so service-learning activities happening annually at the college.

Team Players: Another great thing that experiential learning does is create leadership opportunities for students. Giving students opportunities to step up and lead is one of the best ways we have to prepare students to be productive members of a team. What we hear from employers who recruit at Terry year after year is that our students hit the ground running when they come into a job. That comes from academic rigor, certainly, but it also comes from applying what you’ve learned. Capstone projects, professional student organizations, and volunteer service in the community all provide opportunities to practice being a great member of a team. Sometimes that means leading, and sometimes it’s following — either way it’s valuable experience.

Explain the career services, programming, and extracurriculars that give your students an advantage in career outcomes?

We’ve layered our student services so that there are appropriate resources for every stage of the undergraduate experience. Lining up a great job by graduation doesn’t begin in your senior year. For pre-business students, the programming is more in tune with their professional development. Do they have a LinkedIn page and what kind of impression does it give? We encourage our new students to join our private group on LinkedIn, called TerryConnect, and get their first exposure to our alumni network.

Another great resource is Terry Peer Interview Coaching. We train and pay students to advise their younger peers on résumé critiques, general interview advice, building up to behavioral and technical interview practice for specific fields. This past year, TPIC advised more than a thousand students. By the time our students are meeting employers, they’ve developed greater self-awareness and a more professional pitch. The home stretch is the multiple, varied ways we connect alumni and recruiters with our students — tabling, information sessions, coffee chats, competition judging, speaking to student organizations, and leading workshops. If a Terry student engages with what our Undergraduate Students Services team has to offer, they’ll leave us with a full-time job and an extensive network.

When alumni look back on their time in your undergraduate business program, what would they consider to be their signature experience?

When our alumni look back on their undergraduate experience, what they appreciate is the incredible number of curricular and extracurricular opportunities they had to choose from at the University of Georgia, and the Terry College specifically. The exposure they were given to so many educational options, tailored to their interests, helped them professionally and — when they reflect back — they can see how those experiences opened doors to the careers they chose and have thrived in.

For younger alumni, many of those opportunities are more evident, and certainly more effective, because of our new home in the Business Learning Community, six buildings that we opened between 2015 and 2019. It doesn’t take long for business students to see how our classrooms and communal areas were designed for connection with each other, with faculty and staff, and with alumni. The Business Learning Community has been transformative in more ways than we could’ve imagined.

What is the most underrated feature of your undergraduate business program and how does it enhance the experience for your business majors?

The University of Georgia has over 350,000 living alumni, and the Terry alumni network numbers more than 80,000 graduates living and working in every region of the United States and 80 countries around the world. The breadth, depth, and engagement of our alumni network is remarkable, and the value it gives to business majors in their professional journey and future success could never be fully grasped until they’re able to experience it firsthand.

Which employers are the biggest consumers of your undergraduate talent and what have they told you about your alumni that make them so special?

Many of our students pursue jobs with leading companies that have big operations in metro Atlanta. EY, Delta Air Lines, Truist, Cox Enterprises, Aon, State Farm, and UPS are among our biggest employers. An increasing number of our students have interests that are drawing them to other key financial markets from coast to coast and internationally, or to younger startups and new industries. The mix of employers that are hiring Terry students is quite broad. Some of the most consistent feedback we hear from employers about our graduates is their impressive work ethic, collaboration skills, and readiness to dive in.

What else would you like readers to know about your program?

One of the clearest reasons Terry is a school to watch is our growing reputation, based on how we’ve climbed in the rankings and improved across multiple measures. Poets&Quants dubbed us one of “2025’s High Risers” in their Best Undergraduate Business School rankings. This past year, all of the college’s undergraduate majors were ranked by U.S. News & World Report, with four of them ranked among the nation’s top 10 public programs in their respective fields. U.S. News ranked our bachelor’s program 13th among public business schools and top 25 overall. We’ve seen the same or even better results in the MBA rankings.

This spring, we celebrated the naming of the C. Herman Terry Risk Management and Insurance Program, which was significant because it leads all insurance programs with the No. 1 ranking from U.S. News. It’s also the nation’s largest undergraduate RMI major by enrollment, and this was the fifth straight year it received the top ranking from U.S. News.

All the same, improved rankings aren’t the end game for us, but they do reflect positively on our student outcomes, the work of our faculty and staff, and a collective commitment to excellence across our programs.

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