Why Having a Business Major at a Liberal Arts College?
Why America'southward Business organization Majors Are in Desperate Demand of a Liberal-Arts Education
Their degrees may help them secure entry-level jobs, but to accelerate in their careers, they'll demand much more than technical skills.
American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding plenty of entry-level opportunities. Simply when businesses get hunting for CEOs or managers, "they will say, a couple of decades out, that I'm looking for a liberal arts grad," said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Plant'southward Business concern and Order Programme.
That presents a growing challenge to colleges and universities. Students are clamoring for degrees that will assistance them secure jobs in a shifting economy, only to succeed in the long term, they'll require an education that allows them to grow, arrange, and contribute as citizens—and to build successful careers. And it's why many schools are shaking up their curricula to ensure that undergraduate business majors receive something they may not fifty-fifty know they demand—a rigorous liberal-arts education.
They're trying to solve a chop-chop growing trouble. Near one in five bachelor'due south degrees earned in the United States is a business degree, according to the latest statistics from the Section of Pedagogy. And that may actually understate the growth of business concern pedagogy—it doesn't account for undergraduate minors, nor for the students who major in economics at schools where business degrees aren't on offer. Simply a console of educators moderated past Samuelson at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, emphasized the need to ensure that these degrees provide a robust instruction. (The panel was drawn from participants in the Aspen Undergraduate Business organisation Education Consortium, an initiative that's promoting the tighter integration of the liberal arts into business curricula.)
There's good reason for their concern. Put but, business majors seem to be graduating with some of the technical skills they'll need to secure jobs, just without having made the gains in writing or critical-thinking skills they'll require to succeed over the form of their careers, or to adapt as their technical skills become outdated and the nature of the opportunities they take shifts over time.
A 2014 study of the Collegiate Learning Assessment test—administered to some thirteen,000 undergraduates as they entered and exited university—found that business, health, and education majors substantially underperformed students in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and engineering. The authors then adapted their results to business relationship for the academic abilities of students entering these majors—and found that business and teaching majors nevertheless showed substantially lower gains in writing, complex reasoning, and critical thinking by the time they'd graduated.
Those are the weaknesses that a liberal-arts education can address. "Liberal arts majors … are the students who have the active minds, who are request the big questions," said Erika Walker, an assistant dean at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. That, she said, was a mindset that all students require. "What nosotros need to strive to achieve for the students who aren't asking the big questions is: challenge yourselves."
Finding workers who ask those questions can pay off—literally—for businesses. "Nosotros have become then myopic in solving business problems that nosotros don't think near those bug from the perspective of other disciplines," said Charles Iacovou, dean of the school of business at Wake Forest Academy. And that sort of context offers a critical competitive edge, even if not all undergraduates understand that. "More reflective teaching is the kind of thing they push back on," Walker said. "But this is what businesses are telling us they need."
Businesses want workers who take "the ability to think, the ability to write, the ability to sympathise the cultural or historical context of whatsoever business decision they're making," added Rachel Reiser, banana dean at Boston Academy'due south Questrom School of Business. If undergraduates want to discover success, they demand to master those skills. "We're trying to help them understand there may exist so much more to a business education," Walker said.
And beyond the career advantages that these skills confer, there's a broader instance for offering a liberal-arts didactics to the hundreds of thousands of students who graduate every year with business degrees. It doesn't only increase their economical competitiveness, it besides strengthens their ability to contribute to the broader order, and to lead fulfilling lives. "We as educational institutions have two jobs: to gear up them to enter the profession but also to prepare them as human beings and as citizens," Iacovou said.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/why-americas-business-majors-are-in-desperate-need-of-a-liberal-arts-education/489209/
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