So it's probably no surprise that Wharton was the Penn name at the center of an unusual lawsuit that wrapped up last week in U.S. District Court here - a case that raises fascinating questions about the value of brand-name degrees, both to students and the schools they attend.
Frank Reynolds, 46, enrolled eight years ago in Penn's Executive Master's in Technology Management program. EMTM, as it is known, is housed in Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, but since 1998 it has been "cosponsored" by Wharton.
Therein - in that confusing and nuanced distinction - lies the rub: Reynolds was so convinced that Wharton's name would confer a special aura on him that he filed a lawsuit when he felt that aura was being unfairly withheld.
In Penn's view, presented by attorney James P. Golden, Reynolds was bent on payback because he was unhappy with the lines Penn insisted on drawing that distinguished EMTM students from their full-fledged Wharton counterparts.
Reynolds' attorney, Richard J. Heleniak, instead portrayed a disgruntled consumer. He told the jury that Reynolds' case was simply about "not getting what you paid for."
There are complications aplenty in this case. Reynolds has now won two jury verdicts. His first, in which he was awarded $435,000 in damages from Penn in October, was voided on appeal. Last week, a new jury awarded Reynolds $66,000; Penn's attorney said he planned to challenge that judgment, too.
But beyond the complications lie clashing perspectives on what Penn held out to Reynolds and his fellow students in the EMTM program, as the university tried to simultaneously take advantage of the Wharton brand name and avoid the risks of cheapening it.
Penn officials said a key concern was that the EMTM program, for which admissions were considerably less competitive, not become a "backdoor" to a Wharton M.B.A. But averting that risk while capitalizing on the Wharton brand led to some subtle distinctions.
Discussing one presentation that described EMTM as "a joint venture" that "draws strongly on the resources of both schools," a former associate director explained that "joint venture" did not mean a joint degree. "The word joint was an adjective here," Joel Adler told jurors. "Venture is the noun."
And yet, Penn also made clear that it expected EMTM students to profit from the Wharton association.
In one e-mail to a prospective student, Adler explained how the program would lead to a master's in engineering from Penn, and also to a certificate cosigned by the deans of the engineering school and of Wharton.
Adler wrote that the certificate "was created expressly at the students' request to show that EMTM was a co-sponsored program between Engineering and Wharton (as distinguished from a joint degree or dual degree program). Graduates are therefore free to use whatever affiliation suits them at the moment, Wharton, Engineering, or Penn, in any combination."
Ultimately, there was one issue on which the plaintiff and defense agreed: the outsize value of the Wharton brand. One irony is that Reynolds' career may illustrate that both sides exaggerate its importance - that, as some studies suggest, the best students will succeed no matter what "brand" their diploma bears.
Reynolds says Wharton's brand proved its value to him immediately. Within a month of starting the EMTM program, and with the help of the Wharton career-services office, he said he got an executive position at Siemens AG as director of global business development, at an annual salary of $269,000.
"It was exactly what I was paying for at Wharton," he told the jury.
Reynolds says something changed about a year later - a change he says culminated with an EMTM official threatening him with discipline for portraying himself as a Wharton student.
Reynolds says he ultimately felt forced to resign his job at Siemens, where he says he was known as "the Wharton guy," because he feared being accused of misrepresenting himself professionally. To remedy the situation, he applied to another top-tier business school, the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Reynolds says the interruption came at great costs, even if he ultimately landed on his feet - in his view, partly thanks to the MIT brand. He now runs InVivo Therapeutics Corp., a Cambridge, Mass., biotechnology start-up with the ambitious goal of finding treatments for otherwise irreversible cases of paralysis.
Marc Brownstein, a branding expert at Philadelphia's Brownstein Group, says Penn officials have good reasons to draw lines protecting Wharton's brand. Like all owners of high-value brands, they face a constant challenge in protecting them - including from their own lapses in discipline.
"The Wharton brand has global gravitas," Brownstein says. "You say that name anywhere around the world, and people instantly know it and respect it. What's that worth?"
How about $100,000, the amount it would have cost to have just given Reynolds his money back and avoided this entire mess?
