<p>Williams does not have an undergrad business school, so if I want to go into business, should I still apply?</p>
<p>Of course. TONS of Williams grads to into business, to B schools, to Wall Street, and to the I-banking world. Undergrad business is considered by many to be a waste of time anyway.</p>
<p>@marvin100 thanks for your response 
</p>
<p>Can you clarify on this “waste of time”? I thought business undergrads would have an advantage over people who went to an A&S undergrad school, for instance.</p>
<p>Many top firms actually prefer liberal arts majors from a top school like Williams to a garden variety undergraduate biz school. They’re interested in smart, well-educated people who have sharpened their critical thinking skills, and they can teach them the nuts and bolts of the business on the job. </p>
<p>“Why businesses prefer a liberal arts education” <a href=“Why Businesses Prefer a Liberal Arts Education”>http://www.cnbc.com/id/100642178</a></p>
<p>@BarrelBlaster - “I thought business undergrads would have an advantage over people who went to an A&S undergrad school, for instance.” </p>
<p>An understandable misconception. It may be true for, say Wharton undergrad (and really only Wharton) but if so it’s because of prestige and networking. Everyone I’ve ever met in the business world has said undergrad business is pretty much irrelevant, and that the deeper communication, analysis, synthesis, and critical thinking skills developed in a more academic (as opposed to pre-professional) undergrad program are far more useful than the watered-down management stuff in an undergrad business program. </p>
Yes yes all those business school majors are unemployed and all the psych/int relations kids are just living it up in the business world. What a bunch of nonsense.
Better have your dad own a hedge fund if you believe this nonsense.
Thank you for your well-reasoned, thoughtful contribution, @anotherparent22. You’re a role model for us all.
Well… You pay twice for college if you need to get an MBA to get the kind of job you want. If you can get into a highly ranked undergrad business school (Wharton, Ross, etc), do that if you know for sure you want to work in business. I have an undergrad BBA from Ross, and can assure you it was not a “waste of time”.
Interesting, @intparent. Do you feel the information and skills you learned in that undergrad program have been useful in your career in business? I frequently hear from friends that MBA programs are useful but I’ve never heard that firsthand about undergrad business school. I apologize if my comment was offensive to you–it certainly wasn’t meant to be!
Hugely helpful. I studied accounting, finance, marketing, operations, info systems management, etc. in a case study environment with extremely bright fellow students and the same profs who teach the MBA courses. I certainly understand the value of a liberal arts education as well (year prior to starting BBA program spent in Literature, Science, and Arts at Michigan, and both my kids went to LACs because they weren’t interested in studying business). But if you KNOW you want a career in business, I personally would not spend 4 years at a LAC.
Excellent. Thanks for sharing your experiences!
marvin100,
A job application at any company by a Williams graduate will always get high consideration. This is more a tribute to the quality of the institution than the liberal arts curriculum. Question is whether a company that has need for a particular skill set wants to invest time in a person that has to be trained in areas they never really explored. Grasping basics about Ledgers and financial structures is not brain surgery but requires certain way of seeing the World that may not come from studying Classics.
Major in Economics.
Everyone I know from Williams who was interested in business got a job at a top-notch consulting firm, investment bank, or hedge fund out of college. These are precisely the same employers that any top graduate of any undergrad business program is aiming for. Folks with quantitative majors like math, cs, physics, and mathematically-focused econ consistent get jobs at tech firms like Google, as well. So obviously, the employers don’t think that you need a business curriculum to succeed. My friends who eventually got MBAs went to Wharton, Wharton, Harvard, Haas (on scholarship), Sloan and Tuck, respectively. Not all of them had killer GPAs at Williams, either. Other friends have succeeded in business without an MBA. Several of the top hedge funds out there are run by Williams grads (Chase Coleman, Andres Halvorsen), and several prominent past and future CEOs were Williams grads (just look at Williams’ Wikipedia alumni list). The examples go on and on, but really, if there is any advantage to an undergraduate business curriculum, it’s not evident from the career paths of graduates.
I think the one real advantage of an undergrad business school is if you want to be en entrepreneur in or directly out of college (not to say it’s impossible from Williams, lots of prominent examples like Steve Case of AOL fame, Bo Peabody/Ethan Zuckerman, etc.). They have the infrastructure and support to help you get a business idea off the ground while still in college – Williams, or really any LAC, is not going to offer that, so you’d have to be more independent in that regard. But if you want to start your career at the most prestigious large employers of business grads, you can’t do any better than Williams.
BarrelBlaster, the key to answering your question is the answer to a threshold question: do you want to go get an education, or do you want to go to trade school? You want trade school? Go find a biz school and major in accounting. The accounting kids wind up learning more about finance than the finance kids do at the undergrad level anyway. If you’re doing undergrad biz, my experience, and that of everyone I’ve ever spoken to on the subject, agrees that the rigor in undergrad biz is in accounting.
If you want an education, DON’T DO UNDERGRAD BIZ. I have a BA in Philosophy from the University of Washington and a BA in Finance from the UW’s Foster School. I went to law school at UPenn. I am counsel to a large public company and my specialty is corp. fin (mostly project and other structured finance - a lot of private equity experience) and M&A. First hand I will tell you that the BA in Finance was a straight waste of my time, and I would have learned as much or more about finance in the econ department. The Philosophy degree serves me well every single day I set foot in the office. Someone will try and make the point that undergrad biz at UW is so, so, so much different than undergrad biz at, say, Michigan. I would dismiss that out of hand, because they don’t really know that, and the UW business school is pretty good. It’s not super elite, but it’s not low-level by any stretch.
Consider this, too, as you think through the problem. Why do most Ivies and Stanford not have undergrad business schools? Is there something wrong with those places? Is the University of Michigan, with its 50+% admit rate, somehow better than, say, Princeton? Dartmouth? Harvard?
Unless you REALLY need your first job out of school to be your last job, I would not encourage any 18-year old kid to go to a business school. At that age, it’s relatively limited in its utility for the vast majority of kids who have no context for what they’re learning. My advice to my kid, if they were asking this question, would be to go to a solid school and major in econ, math, physics, whatever, then work for a few years, and go back and get your MBA or Masters in Tax or whatever it is they happen to be chasing at that point.
The treasurer of my company, who is as sharp a finance mind as anyone I’ve ever known, majored in math at Duke and worked at Goldman for a few and MBA’d at Columbia. THAT’s how you do it if you want business.
One other thing. All the “trade school” people who would have you attend Babson over Bowdoin (DUH!) simply don’t get it, and they’re never going to get it, because they don’t want to get it, because, like common people, they can’t see beyond their own platform and circumstances. Oh Yeah! That’s another thing that a well-rounded education gives you: a broader perspective.
PS: There are senior executives all over the place who hail from LACs or majored in something somewhere OTHER than business. Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric from the “you have to study this precise thing” crowd. Seriously. Study something you’re interested in and that pushes you intellectually, and don’t waste these precious years of your life. YOU CAN ALWAYS BECOME A PLUMBER LATER IN LIFE. It’s really not that hard.
PSS: If there were one, isolated, skill, I’d want to develop in my college days, it would be to learn how to communicate well, both verbally and in writing. The technical people rarely run the show. You’ll find, perhaps much to your chagrin, that technical skill is considered what you were hired to do. The people who will rise to the top and manage those people are often not the best technicians. But they are almost always great communicators.
“and that the deeper communication, analysis, synthesis, and critical thinking skills developed in a more academic (as opposed to pre-professional) undergrad program are far more useful than the watered-down management stuff in an undergrad business program.”
Really well said Marvin100. This is the subtle stuff that the enthusiastic “get a job!” parents who have no experience in the matter simply don’t get and don’t want to get. I agree with you, too, that any result generated by a Wharton undergrad degree can be explained simply by the fact that it’s Wharton and Ivy League and the UPenn. If you’re really into this stuff at the early age of 18, which I would find rather odd myself, but whatever, then major in economics or math or something quant. and come back for your union card later. Get an education for Christ’s sake. Read the big books and have someone smarter than you challenge your understanding of it. Learn about other things and develop a broader perspective. These are the things that made my education worth-while. Not the latest FASB pronouncement on joint venture accounting. Jesus. It’s so obvious that it falls off the plate.
“Yes yes all those business school majors are unemployed and all the psych/int relations kids are just living it up in the business world. What a bunch of nonsense. Better have your dad own a hedge fund if you believe this nonsense.”
Yes, yes, yes, all those people in the business world have BAs in business, and all those poor Princeton and Harvard schmucks, and those poor NESCAC LAC kids, and those misinformed Stanford, Pomona and Claremont M kids, they’re all working in coffee shops and living with their parents, while the Michigan business school kids are running the world. It’s a good thing the coffee shop crowd all have parents who are principals at hedge funds.
I completely see your point now. Empiricism was never high on my list either. It too often gets in the way of seeing things the way I want to see them.
Go Blue!
@BarrelBlaster
IMO, while bright students will have good careers whether they major in business or in something else, I definitely agree with @HuskyLawyer and @marvin100 on this one, and anyone else that took that point of view. Most businesses are in the business of providing a product or service that is in some particular area. Scientific products, chemicals, computer chips are examples in the technology world. It is often more valuable if you get a degree that gives you some depth of understanding in whatever world you hope to enter, and learn the business side on the job along with getting an MBA. At the least it helps you relate to your customers better, but it can also help within the company, depending on what role you play.
I am not saying that if you are going to be an accountant for a chemicals firm you need a chemistry degree, that is silly. But if you hope to do other things within the company and/or rise up to upper management, it can be very useful to understand at a more than superficial level what the company does. In less technical areas this can be learned on the job too, of course, and there are thousands of examples of business grads doing well in these companies. I just personally think that the education you get from a more specific major and a broader variety of courses serves one better in the long run. A Williams education in whatever interests you most will serve you best. Companies hire based on a lot more than what your degree was in, unless it is required for the job such as engineering or architecture.
Of course it is past the deadline, so I guess you have either applied or you haven’t. But I think the message is the same no matter where you end up.
" I just personally think that the education you get from a more specific major and a broader variety of courses serves one better in the long run. A Williams education in whatever interests you most will serve you best. Companies hire based on a lot more than what your degree was in, unless it is required for the job such as engineering or architecture."
Exactly.
Thanks everyone for your feedback and advice! Thankfully, I did apply to Williams, and now I see this school in a whole new light.