A relevant inconsistency.
I wouldn’t support fragbot jr matriculating to an undergrad business program but I would heartily support study in economics. For whatever reason, I perceive it as significantly more rigorous and coherent*. Am I deluding myself in thinking this is a reasonable position to take?
*and academically more engaging, but that’s a personal thing.
^^An undergrad business degree at Wharton or Haas is like a BS in Econ (Applied Econ) vs. a BA Theoretical Econ. It 's much more employable. If you think there are a ton of business majors, there are even more Econ majors. As far as i’m concerned Econ is even more directionless and on a steeper incline to a goal of being employed.
My sons college acedemic advisor told him not to go to the business school bc “you are too smart for that!” Still, he wants to go. We’ll see.
And there are some studies in a business program that are quite difficult to be good at. The “rocket sciences” of business. So it is possible to still be very challenged if you want to be. But, as others note, your electives have to challenge weaker areas of the program, such as writing. And frankly, college English is not the answer, if it promotes “literary style”. They need to write in perfect English, in very concise manner, with as few words as possible. Is that even taught in college.
Since you mentioned Haas (UCB), comparing the business and economics majors at UCB, the difference is that:
At UCB, business is a more selective major than economics (though both are large), which may account for preferences by some employers toward business majors over economics majors. However, economics majors do not do too badly in the UCB career survey, though business majors do somewhat better: https://career.berkeley.edu/Survey/2015Majors
Of course, this is at a school where both the business and economics majors are often considered elite or nearly elite. Course content and rigor and post-graduation results may be different at schools where one or both is seen by employers and PhD programs as non-elite.
@ucbalumnus “At UCB, business is a more selective major than economics (though both are large), which may account for preferences by some employers toward business majors over economics majors. However, economics majors do not do too badly in the UCB career survey, though business majors do somewhat better: https://career.berkeley.edu/Survey/2015Majors.”
Thanks for posting the link. I did not know its existence although I have suspected a similar result based on my own observations in other flagship universities. UCB has done a better reporting job than most public universities.
Your reading of the survey was largely accurate. I just want to point out one thing, that is, the respond rate. Economics has a 36% whereas business has 54%. In general, graduates tend to respond to career survey when they have a good placement. If so, the true difference in placement results between economics and business can be larger than those reported survey numbers would suggest.
Deluding. Basic econ is good and useful. Advanced stuff is usually nonsense which is why most econ predictions are bad. Too many assumptions not suited to real world. complexities and dynamics.
@leftrightleft Even though we haven’t sent our first child off to college yet, I still know a thing or two. My husband and I went to Northwestern and the school does not have a business major. Virtually every person I still keep in touch with from undergrad is successful in their own way. Yes, a handful were engineering majors, but many were English, History, Econ, Theater and even Music majors. If we had a child interested in Accounting or Finance, I wouldn’t be opposed to it but we do not.
Not every kid has an interest in Tolstoy or astronomy or literature. My daughter didn’t particularly care for her HS English, History, Spanish or Science classes, and while she liked her art classes, she had no talent. The only HS classes she enjoyed and was good at were Math, Accounting, Statistics and Econ, so it was not at all surprising that she chose to major in business - at a state flagship that doesn’t have particularly competitive admissions, not an elite school. She certainly did not major in business because her parents wanted to be sure she got a job when she graduated (although she did, for which her parents are grateful). She also didn’t choose business because she thought it was easy and she could major in Greek life and beer. She took the full calculus series and 6 upper level math courses beyond that, plus a couple statistics classes and some very quantitative economics and finance classes. There may be some business majors who coast, but there are plenty who take a challenging course load and would prefer that their business majors not be looked down upon.
Business is a trade. It doesn’t require much education; it requires a decent work ethic and a lot of training, most of which by its nature does not involve intellectual pursuits. But you can have a surprisingly good career in business if you know how to read and write (many, many people in business do not --they call in “wordsmiths” when they want to say something). Business majors study less than anyone else? Well, sure: there’s much less to study.
Theater is a trade. Astronomy is a trade. Anything you do for a living is a trade. Just bc a degree is useful in work does not make it easier than one that is not.
By this logic, quantum physicists just need lots of “training.”
And we don’t call in wordsmiths. You need to be able to write for yourself or you are doomed in business. You also need to analytic, quick thinking and flexible to succeed. The ones we train up don’t usually rise to the top…
Business is a great major for Wharton and Dyson kids. It may be less than ideal for someone bound for SIU-Carbondale (apologies, Salukis, I was trying to think of a non-flagship not near a major city and you guys came to mind first). The issue is that there are only so many spots for management fast-track in the tech and finance worlds, and the competition is fierce. B-school at one of the top programs is the straightest path. Can you get there another way? Yes, but if that is your goal, I am not sure studying philosophy is a better way.
^^^ This is 100% accurate. Most MBA programs will not accept students straight from college. They have no idea what its really like in the real world…they must work first or concurrently with the MBA program.
I’m planning on majoring in finance, and even that does not seem like a lot of math. Finance and accounting seem to be the more math geared business majors, but neither really needs to go past Calc 1 or 2.
Also, outside of investment banking, does prestige of the school matter for business in general? Most postgraduate surveys I’ve seen have higher average salaries at elite schools, but that may just be the IB skewing the results.
The preference is to work full-time in between undergrad and MBA.
Even doing it concurrently is problematic if the student starts doing it straight out of undergrad as from the perspective of MBA adcoms/Profs/and post-MBA prospective employers s/he would not have had internalized enough post-college full-time working experience to take full advantage of the MBA program.
D2 is doing a joint JD/MBA program. It seems to be the exception to the “you must work first” MBA mantra. DH is concerned how she will do amongst a class cohort of people with working experience. She will have done her law school program already (and hopefully passed the bar), so perhaps that will confer a little more maturity/knowledge/legitimacy when compared to someone truly fresh out of undergrad. Her program is a four year one, with law school comprising the first three years.
Typical finance courses in typical business majors do not go beyond needing single variable calculus and introductory level statistics. But those going into quantitative finance may take much more advanced math and statistics courses, and may have a primary major in a quantitative subject (like math or statistics) as opposed to business.
I’ve been working long enough to have an opinion on this…
I have very little to love about most of the business undergrad degrees I see. They’re not particularly rigorous, they give very little framework for making lettered people, and most of the jobs that aren’t super technical these days aren’t really aided by a degree in glorified applied econ.
I would much rather teach people strong quantitative and qualitative skills and how to be useful members of society than basic accounting. It’s not like I learned how to do pivot tables in undergrad anyway.
@ucbalumnus God, if I could ban intro stats taught by people who think that the point of stats is to learn how to look up chi-square values in a textbook, I’d do it so fast. I really wish intro stats started with probability theory.
“outside of investment banking, does prestige of the school matter for business in general?”
Prestige is probably most important for consulting (the big three).
Prestige also plays a role for investment banking. Here, prestige is defined in a more broad sense, and the number of target schools is like 20-30.
Private equity and venture capital are usually reserved for seasoned bankers and MBAs. A very small number of undergraduates from HYPS and Wharton does go into these fields right out of gate.
Asset management and wealth management are usually more friendly to non-elite undergraduates.
For accounting students, many of them today enter a 1-year master program to have 150 credit hours in order to sit in the CPA exam.
A college pal, who lived across the hall in my dorm, was a chemistry and philosophy double major. IME, if you are a hiring manager, that’s the kind of combination you look for: a hard science plus real liberal arts. But you have to look hard because there are not many of them around. The few that exist often have higher ambitions than working in business. For example, my friend became a career officer in the Navy.
I don’t think this is a particularly compelling point as I just looked at the response rates for CS and EECS and they’re at 46 and 43 percent respectively. I think it’d be ludicrous to argue 2015 BBA graduates are more employable than a their CS and EECS counterparts. Spot-checking 15-20 other degrees’ response rates shows the BBA to be anomalous as material science was the only other degree that was above 50%. Remarkably, math was abysmal at 26%.
In my own work, we sometimes do surveys on company wide presentations we’ve done. In my observations, the response rate is more a function of a presenter explicitly asking the audience to fill one out than it is an indicator of a presentation’s quality. Similarly, I would expect certain departments being more organized about these surveys than others.