I don’t think double majors would be required. Just take some classes which will increase writing and math skills. Bigger issue is that a lot of kids don’t want to do that. I think the results from a lot of kids not wanting to be in college but rather believing they have to be in college. And in some cases, kids who probably shouldn’t be in college.
Only business major I would allow my kids is accounting or finance. Have son in undergrad business now at top national university. Reports curriculum for business admin is a “joke”, a major favored by party loving frat boys
“One medium-sized financial firm I worked for in the Boston area made it a point to unofficially have a policy of NOT HIRING undergrad business majors UNLESS they were from elite undergrad BBA schools like Wharton, NYU-Stern, Berkeley-HAAS, UVA-McIntire, UMich-Ross, etc.”
I’d also wager they only hire liberal arts grads from a few top schools–not second tier schools.
How much math is required for the typical poli sci, history or psychology major?? Often less than for a BBA.
My daughter was a business major, and she had to take freshman composition, literature, a business communications course and an additional business course that had a heavy writing component. This was in addition to other classes that fulfilled general education requirements that involved more writing than your typical business courses. She found some of the business courses to be fairly easy, but there was nothing easy about her upper level finance, economics, statistics and math courses. You definitely can’t paint all business majors with the same brush, any more than you can do that with all liberal arts majors.
You’d actually be wrong about that.
From past hiring experiences they had so little trouble with the “Liberal Arts graduates” that they continued to hire them from the very same second/lower-tiered institutions while barring their business major counterparts.
I don’t know about nowadays, but back when I was in HS in the mid '90s, one can gain admission to some of the elite undergrad B-schools I listed above with a B/B+ average even if one was OOS.
Several classmates from my public magnet HS managed to gain admission to NYU Stern with 88/100 averages and SATs which were on the lower end of those required for respectable/elite universities/LACs. Some entered without having taken any calculus or even pre-calc beforehand. And all graduated from those undergrad b-schools with flying colors and found the admittedly greater quant workload to be manageable.
Interesting considering my understanding is that Canadian high schools tend to grade much more severely than your average US K-12 so an A average there would be more impressive indeed.
Data indicate otherwise.
On the stylistic issues, this isn’t so surprising. Most English teachers never spent much if anytime in the business world, so they don’t know what style the business community expects.
@cobrat-I always felt that our grading system is tough but fair. (On average, about 20-25% of students make first class in any given course). This practice continues into university, so you see strange stuff like getting LSAT scores in the 92%tile but a Rotman GPA of 2.9x.
Since senior calculus is an offered course in all high schools, and it is a pre-requisite for STEM, economics and business, the chance of admission into a good business program without it is zero. A family members got into one of the top programs with a B+ in calculus (her only non A in high school) and she almost died in those heavy quant courses required in the first two years of the program.
@citymama9- The same family member did the next best thing. She did a business degree and threw all her electives into English. At graduation, she had more than enough English credits to fulfill the requirements for a 3 year degree (yes, we have that too) majoring in English. It was a dynamic combination. Her employers knew she can do quant, but they were shocked at how well she can write.
Btw, she achieved 1st class honours in her English classes, but not even close in her major. The difference in quality between the cohorts was that great.
I had always heard that majoring in business as an undergraduate really meant majoring in frats and beer.
Sounds like this was closer to accurate than I even knew.
We actually encouraged our children to major in business. We didn’t want them to be like my husband, who pursued an engineering degree as an undergrad, just because he was strong in math and science. (In hindsight dh was very fortunate to graduate when it was still possible to go straight from undergrad to a top MBA program.) Anyway, we hoped they could be a little more self-aware than we were at their age. We encouraged them to choose a major based on themselves and not the expectations of others.
So we began talking with our children about college degrees/majors early with our children. We encouraged them to challenge themselves (take the most rigorous classes offered)…not because we were thinking of college apps, but because we told them they should try to figure out what they like, what they’re good (and not so good) at and what they may want to pursue in life. We talked about how some people are generalists, while others like to specialize in an area. We talked about quality of life issues.
Yes, we’re a family who talked about college as not only a place for personal growth, but perhaps more importantly for career preparation. Developing skills was emphasized over grades…though I confess we had high expectations in that area too.
Luckily all that ‘family talk’ worked. They may be just business majors, but my husband and I both agree that they have worked harder than we ever did in college…perhaps not, if you only look at classwork, but definitely, if you take into account everything they are involved in on campus.
For them, life as a business major is good.
I would like D18 to take at least a few business classes in college so that she’ll have a basic foundation to use if she starts her own business in the future (instead of flying by the seat of her pants like I have!). Not having much luck so far.
I’ve been very impressed at the rigor of DS’ first biz class – they had to come up with a proposal for a Fortune 500 company to grow $500M in 5 years, with some guardrails (had to consider sustainability, etc). The course culminated in a group presentation to biz execs on strategy, finances, and an execution plan. Heady stuff for 18-year olds! I would have loved that class to have been my into to my MBA program. Can’t wait to see what else the curriculum has to offer.
it all depends on the school and their requirements, and also what kind of degree you are talking about. When I was going to school, the generic "business administration’ degree was seen exactly as another poster said, as what frat boys majored in along with drinking beer, and I think there are still grains of truth in that. Finance and Economics are usually seen as business degrees, but they are very different than the business administration I remember, business admin had a smattering of the various areas, finance and especially economics as a major were pretty intensive (I have had enough of both to know how rough it gets later on…). Speaking as a hiring manager, I can tell you that a BA in business administration would not be looked on as favorably as a bachelor’s in economics or finance or in some of the other degrees they have in specialized management and the like. Sure, if you go to Wharton for example as an undergrad (and a lot of places don’t even hire undergrad business school graduates, they want MBA level), it might not matter, because if you got into any elite school there assumption is you already are a good student (not always true, but that is another discussion).
Working on Wall Street, I can tell you that in areas where they traditionally hire business school graduates and at high level consulting firms and such, many of them look for people without business admin degrees, kids coming of of top level schools with STEM degrees are well looked upon, for example, and many of them are looking for non business students because they feel, probably with some reason, that the standard business education in many cases is too looking along a narrow tunnel and they want people who can think outside that track (the words I wrote were my version of something quoted by several high level managers at places like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, UBS and other investment banks in articles I have read recently). That isn’t necessarily a knock on all business programs, a program that does away with much of the case based study and has students working on real world issues/problems to solve could be very attractive, it all depends on the student and the program. Personally, if someone asked me about majoring in business I would tell them if they are going to do it, find a way to make it as broad an education as possible, even if they study finance or economics (the two big majors, if the guy who wrote “Intelligent Sheep” is right, something like 60% of those going to schools like Yale study one of those two fields), because since there are so many studying it, how do you differentiate yourself? Having multiple languages can help, having grounding in technology or science and math certainly can help, the key is gonna be differentiating yourself from everyone else doing this.
60% of Yale students major in finance and econ? Evidence please. Yale doesn’t even HAVE finance for undergrads!
And the Ibanks have lead the economy so brilliantly in last 30 years. LOL. Yes its an old school tie club. And that’s all it is. Now for the other 50 million workers out there…Very different story. Just compare accounting or finance major from any Big Ten school and a history or bio major from same. It matters. Few major in anything called “business admin.” http://bus.wisc.edu/~/media/bus/recruit-hire/2015-2016-bba-employment-outcomes-guide.pdf?la=en
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Well, no. English teachers aren’t teaching business English, nor are first-year composition teachers. That’s a business course. We sure aren’t teaching stylistic flourishes either. First-year comp is about clear thinking and constructing logic- and evidence-based arguments. Those are skills that everyone needs. Even business majors.
And I have to say, I teach students who tend to be grouped the first semester by major, and the business classes tend to average lowest of any major group I’ve taught (bio tends to be highest cuz they need the GPA and they’re used to working like dogs.) I meet some very, very competent business majors, but my observation is that the major attracts a bigger percentage of “I really don’t feel like I want to be in college but I need a job where’s the party” students than other majors. So people who are really committed and competent do fine, but the major is seriously watered down, at least at the start, by the less-committed.
Seems like there is a huge difference between the business major at a less selective school where it is a “default major” for less academically-inclined students, versus the business major at highly selective schools, or the business major which has more selective admissions than the school it is hosted at.
Seems like many posters here would not consider AACSB accreditation to be anything more than a bare minimum indicator of quality.
There are hundreds of AACSB-accredited schools. Without it, it usually indicates big problems. With it, it however does not really say whole a lot about the quality.
Yes, across universities there is great variation in relative quality of business school students vs. the other units’ students. @ucbalumnus as you know, getting into UCB Hass is no easy task. But this may not be so in a few CSUs where business major is not in particularly high demand.
At my state flagship university, we now have more business students, particularly in the area of finance, than we can handle. Our first school-wide policy recently was to set a higher GPA bar for international students. Another higher GPA bar was set for admitting into our finance concentration. The school is not interested in expanding our undergraduate capacity. So we raised bars to suppress demand.
I was looking at the data (Wisconsin’s BBA) posted by @barrons with interest. In comparison, my kid’s program has a 97% employment rate 6 months after graduation (2015). There is no way history/bio majors can claim the same.
The program is smaller (1936 over 4 yrs) than Wisconsin and offers far fewer areas of concentration. The school received 6341 applicants this yr and there is no attempt at yield management. (In fact, the school makes it very clear to potential applicants the minimum grades required to be competitive). If that darling of mine were applying today, it would be an automatic rejection. They now want A in all required subjects-English, calculus, and a second senior math on top of a high A average overall. B+ in calculus simply doesn’t cut it anymore.
The sex ratio is 49% female but very few underrepresented minorities. (My kids had one black classmate each, in a class of about 200 at the time). I think those math requirements are the killers. The school wants to see more diversity but is unwilling to lower admission standards or ease up on the grading. You can not have it both ways.
I think UW over-expanded due to pressures form the state and parents.(Used to be around 1500 total) “Elite” does not really sell well in Wisconsin–much the opposite.