Business Administration: What Do You Really Study?
Marketing, financing, strategy and management — understand how organizations make decisions.
What Do You Study in Business Administration? Core Subjects, Year by Year
What do the degree courses cover?
Open a course to learn about its main topics and see what the work looks like in practice.
What do you learn in the course?Economics for business administration?
Learn how prices, incentives and interest rates affect customers, companies and the economy. The course combines fundamentals of microeconomics and macroeconomics to understand competition, costs, inflation and economic policy from a managerial perspective.
Main topics
- Demand, supply and equilibrium
- Costs and market structures
- Growth, inflation and unemployment
- Interest rate and economic policy
What does it look like in practice?
For example, we analyze how an increase in interest rates can change the demand for the product, the cost of financing and the company's decision to invest.
What do you learn in the course?Accounting?
The course teaches to read and construct the reports that tell what the financial situation of a company is. You get to know the company's balance sheet, profit and loss statement and cash flow statement, and learn how transactions are recorded and how accounting decisions affect the picture you get.
Main topics
- The balance sheet equation and double entry
- Profit and loss statement
- Balance sheet and cash flow
- Inventory, depreciation and income recognition
What does it look like in practice?
For example, you record a purchase of equipment on credit and check how it affects profit, cash, assets and liabilities separately.
What do you learn in the course?Statistics for business administration?
Learn to summarize business data and draw conclusions from it under conditions of uncertainty. Work with distributions, sampling, confidence intervals, hypothesis testing and regression, with an emphasis on interpreting the result and making a decision and not just on the calculation.
Main topics
- Descriptive statistics
- Probability and distributions
- Estimation and testing of hypotheses
- Correlation and regression
What does it look like in practice?
For example, checking whether a new campaign improved the conversion rate beyond what can be explained by random fluctuation.
What do you learn in the course?organizational behavior?
The course examines how people and groups work within organizations. They deal with motivation, leadership, decision making, organizational culture, power and conflicts, and connect psychological research with everyday managerial situations.
Main topics
- motivation and satisfaction
- Teamwork and conflict
- Leadership, power and influence
- Culture and organizational change
What does it look like in practice?
For example, diagnosing why a team with excellent employees is not cooperating and building an intervention that changes goals, roles and feedback.
What do you learn in the course?financing?
Learn how a company and investors value money over time and make decisions under risk. Calculate capitalization and return, evaluate projects and securities and examine the relationship between the sources of financing, the risk and the value of the company.
Main topics
- The time value of money
- risk and return
- Evaluation of investments and projects
- Cost of capital and financing structure
What does it look like in practice?
For example, the cash flows of a new product are capitalized and compared to the initial investment to decide whether the project creates value.
Frequently Asked Questions About Business Administration
Is a degree in Business Administration difficult?
There is no single answer — difficulty depends on your background, the institution, and your chosen study pace. According to this site's estimate, The degree has a relatively small quantitative component, so mathematics is usually not the main obstacle, and a large share of the reading material is in English. A good way to assess fit is to review the course map on this page: if most of the subjects interest you, the effort will usually feel worthwhile.
How long does a degree in Business Administration take?
Usually 3–4 years (Single major, combined or specialization). Exact duration varies by institution and depends on course load and the track you choose.
Business Administration or Communication — which is right for me?
The degrees most closely related to Business Administration are Communication, Economics, and Hospitality and Tourism Management. Their differences are usually in emphasis rather than the overall subject, so the fastest way to decide is to compare their course maps — what you actually study in each program, year by year. You can also open the degree comparison tool to view the differences side by side.