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The Darla Moore School of Business

The University of South Carolina

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Short Facts

Since its founding in 1919 as the School of Commerce, the Darla Moore School of Business has grown into a thriving site of academic excellence, with an enrollment of approximately 4,000 undergraduate students and 800 graduate students.  The faculty comprises 160 teachers, scholars, and practitioners whose expertise encompasses the full spectrum of business disciplines and who were themselves educated at many of the finest universities in the world.

The Moore School is perhaps best known for its outstanding leadership in international business education and research.  For the past twelve years, the Moore School's undergraduate major in international business has been ranked No. 1 in that specialty, and its International Master of Business Administration program has been ranked No. 1 or No. 2 for 20 consecutive years by U.S. News & World Report.  In 2009, the Financial Times of London ranked the Moore School's MBA programs at No. 38 among U.S. universities—ahead of institutions such as Ohio State University, Wake Forest University, and the University of Notre Dame.

The school is home to several leading journals, including the Economics of Education Review, the Human Resource Planning Journal, and the Journal of Risk and Insurance.  In 1990, the U.S. Department of Education selected the Moore School as one of five educational institutions in the country, and the only one in the Southeast, to serve as a Center for International Business and Education Research (CIBER).

The school offers a wide range of programs in addition to its international specializations: nine undergraduate concentrations, five master's programs, and two Ph.D. programs; the Daniel-Mickel Center for Executive Education; and an annual Economic Outlook Conference that draws widely from the public sector as well as academia.

New Initiatives

To complement its established leadership in international business, the Moore School is expanding its focus to sustainable enterprise and development, a strategy spanning a variety of disciplines within and beyond the school.  This initiative will address fundamental questions regarding the economics of scarce resources, sustainable business practices for developing and established countries, and the roles of public and private actors in the global marketplace.

Matching Gift Challenge

The school has enjoyed the generous support of its alumni and, in fact, is named for businesswoman Darla Moore, a partner in the private investment firm Rainwater Inc.  She made an initial donation of $25 million to the school in 1998 and pledged an additional $45 million in 2004, with the challenge for the school to match her gift to create funding for facilities, fellowships, scholarships and endowed chairs for faculty. 

Midnight August 3, 2009 brought the official end to a successful five-year campaign by the University of South Carolina and the Darla Moore School of Business to raise funds to match Darla Moore’s challenge. At that time, the university committed to match $15 million, leaving the business school to raise $30 million in private donations.

The school’s development team has not only met that match, but has exceeded it by $14.7 million, raising a total of $44.7 million. Combined with Ms. Moore’s $45 million commitment, the gift is the largest ever given to South Carolina’s flagship university, and is among the largest donations ever given to a top business school in the country.