@cobrat
One would think the LAC grad who is “disturbed” by the writing skills of college of business grads would know better than to take anecdotal data and try to extrapolate it and think it is reliable. Anecdotal data is just that. A small sample.
The COB grads I know can’t write well, therefore, all college of business grads do not write well. Had you just shared your first hand experiences that would have been fine, I might have disagreed with you based on my first hand experiences, and we both would have had a point. But, besides writing, COB grads learn some practical real world skills that are useful for running real business that hire real people that pay real taxes so they don’t have time to sit around all day and theorize about what budgets or tax compliance is in an abstract way or write 45 page gobbly-gook papers about any topic they can do functional things that generate revenues which why they will get hired.
Regarding what you, and a few others that seem to be a bit hard to find now, posted about how hard a degree from the COB is, you are wrong, but carry on it doesn’t matter to me what you think about that. Go ahead and theorize all day about absolutely nothing and post links back and forth in a completely pointless way. The government is full of people with fancy degrees from expensive schools and look how well the government functions and handles resources. Great at theory, not so hot in practice.
But, that isn’t why I can back to this thread.
I actually came back to kind of agree with @cobrat in one sense and it is based on anecdotal information of all things. The dean of the COB at the major research university in my city made some big changes to admissions to that college a few years ago. In short, what he did was require all students entering the COB to take 5 foundation level classes and get a certain GPA in those five foundation classes to stay in the COB. I think he also laid off/fired/furloughed some of the lower level none PhD faculty also. He blogged about it and so forth and I heard about it because I teach at a community college that feeds that university.
What he wanted was quality and not quantity.
He determined that there were too many COB grads in relation to the number of quality jobs available for COB grads so he did something about it. Before the changes, cobrat you were kind of right, some of the COB grads from this school were not exactly proficient in communication skills. It turns out, just about anybody in higher education, across all disciplines, bemoans that same thing. We all see it and we all wonder when the world will end because of it.
What is somewhat remarkable about what the dean did was that he did it at a public university. Usually, public U’s do not limit programs in that way unless there is a clear need to do so. Usually, in my experience, public U’s will bring them in and churn them out without any regard to the job market. In turns out, that is your problem not theirs.
My advice to parents with children considering a COB degree is due your due diligence. Check it out. If the programs are responsive to the needs of the workforce and updated and sound real and legit your child will get an excellent education if he or she does his or her part. The COB dean I am speaking of made the changes because employers were complaining about that school’s COB grads. The curriculum changed to better meet the needs of the ER’s and that is what you are looking for in any college program IMHO. By the way, there is something else of interest here to parents and students that I’d like to share.
From what I’ve heard, through the grapevine, the major research U’s COB added some sort of business administration degree for the folks who do pursue a “technical” field like finance or accounting from the COB. The word on the street is it is a “baby” degree. I’m not 100% sure what that means but what I heard was it is a watered down degree for the people who couldn’t hack a real COB degree. In other words, be careful what you sign up for.
