<p>
</p>
<p>As a business school professor, I totally agree. I’d never pay for my children to get an undergrad in business, for that reason.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The question is, why are business major degree programs low-rigor?</p>
<p>In theory, business could or should be a rigorous combination of applied economics, psychology, math, and statistics. In reality, it seems to be a low-rigor major at many schools and is particularly popular at the least selective schools. One can say that there is the incentive to be less rigorous because being more rigorous can drive away some of the students – but wouldn’t other departments competing for students have the same incentives?</p>
<p>Or is it that companies value the business degree as a credential more than they value other non-specific bachelor’s degrees, so business departments get even more slack in reducing the rigor of their courses?</p>
<p>ucbalumnus, I visited Mizzou with my parents and their business program especially the accounting program is quite challenging. First of all to enter their accounting program they are asking students to have a 3.7 GPA to enter as a junior. Now I have not attend yet, so I do not know how rigorous their classes are.</p>
<p>High entrance selectivity does not necessarily mean high course rigor once one is in the program. Indeed, if the 3.7 GPA entrance standard does not vary based on the rigor of courses included in the GPA, it could create the same incentives that medical and law schools create – namely seeking out “easy A” courses instead of courses with maximum learning potential that may carry the risk of a grade lower than an A-.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Great question. Not sure I know. I teach in an extremely selective program so there is absolutely no pressure about losing students; indeed, programs are universally growing and there is huge demand. </p>
<p>I believe one of the programs is the pull towards ‘application’…in my 20 plus years, it feels the students are getting weaker. On average it does not attract the intellectual, the well read, the brilliant kids that have a passion for learning, but instead the pragmatic kids that just want the least work for the most future salary, and are just looking for a piece of paper. And there are increasing pressures for ‘applied’ and ‘skills’ and away from ‘theory’ …on one hand I absolutely get the importance of relevance, but on the other hand relevance in b-school isn’t like say relevance in engineering…taking it truly going toward what feels at times like vocational school rather than an academic discipline. </p>
<p>It is also a challenge to teach kids this material without work experience. They have nothing to hang it on, and adding a lot of practical aspects helps to offset that. Sure you can teach formulas, but quite another to talk about strategy, operations and logistics, and more abstract concepts with students who don’t even manage their own cell phone bill yet.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Hmmm, but don’t you have to know enough of the theory in order to apply it properly?</p>
<p>My primary purpose for sending her to college was that she did such a thorough job of fouling the nest during senior year that I couldn’t stand to live with her any more.</p>
<p>LasMa - that’s funny.</p>
<p>I send my kids to college so they could support themselves in the manner they have grown accustomed to, AND to support me in my old age (or just not to put me in a bad nursing home).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I wouldn’t go that far, because I don’t choose to exercise a veto over my kids’ college choices (other than for affordability reasons). I advise, urge, cajole, arm-twist - but ultimately, the choice is theirs and I will fully support them in whatever decision they make.</p>
<p>That said, I would advise, urge, etc., any kid to avoid an undergraduate business degree, unless - an important unless - they had several years of solid, full-time, real-world work experience first. I admit to being somewhat biased - I started my undergrad business courses at 28, with two years of traditional liberal arts already under my belt, and the students in the program I was in were almost exclusively working adults. It has served me well. In fact, I later went to the same school and got an MBA, and the MBA program was essentially a mediocre review of my undergrad work.</p>
<p>Son of a friend went off to a LAC (respected but not so-called “top tier”) that also offers business degrees, intending to be a business major. As a first-semester freshman, he took Marketing 101. Near the end of the semester, the professor pulled him and a few of the other best students aside and advised them that if they really wanted to be successful long-term in the business world, they would be well-advised to get out of the business program and find more challenging majors. He took the advice, changed his major to sociology, graduated last spring, and got a good job in marketing with a consumer products company right out of school. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Based on the kids from our area who have gone off to college to study business, I would say this is accurate. I think it also attracts the kid who may be capable and willing of a more challenging program but who is pressured by well-meaning but misguided parents to major in something “practical.”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In addition to the answers from starbright, with which I agree, I would offer this. The research reported in “Academically Adrift” indicates a high correlation between time spent studying alone and the development of critical thinking skills. Yet business courses and business professors emphasize collaborative projects, on the theory (correct insofar as it goes) that business success requires collaboration with others. FWIW.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I’m not sure that’s true as a general proposition, though I’m sure some companies do. I think it may be more accurate to say that the perception is that a business degree makes you more “employable.”</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>One would think so. And there is solid theory behind most business subjects. But a lot of what is actually taught in many business schools could most accurately be described as applied BS.</p>
<p>“Well, they’re not yet ready to be independent, self-supporting adults, and that’s not just becuase they’re not “job-ready”. They need to mature. They need to learn how to think. They need to know how to work and play nicely with others.”</p>
<p>The idea that college is the best place for a kid to gain maturity is absurd. One year doing any full time job in the workplace will provide much more maturity than four years at any residential college in the country.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>that can be described to most majors</p>
<p>As a successful business owner, I disagree with the above posters. My business degree served me well…be it marketing, accounting, finance, ect. I use them all.</p>
<p>I know this forum is dominated by the liberal arts crowd and they preach how only a liberal arts degree can teach our children how to think “critically”. I say BS to that. There are also many very good schools that offer great general ed requirements along with a business degree.</p>
<p>My answer was going to be: to get them out of the house. But LasMa said it better:</p>
<p>My primary purpose for sending her to college was that she did such a thorough job of fouling the nest during senior year that I couldn’t stand to live with her any more. </p>
<p>My experience has been that they are a lot nicer when they come home for breaks! They are especially grateful for the food.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>It has long been said that doing an MBA after a bachelor’s degree in business is mostly a waste of time, since MBA programs do not assume any prior course work in business.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>As the holder of two business degrees, I’m really not part of the “liberal arts crowd,” and I have not (and would not) argue that only a liberal arts degree can teach one how to think critically. I would argue that most business courses at many schools are more oriented toward vocational training than education, and that for long-term success in life, education trumps vocational training. That is especially true for business, where the vocational skills can be picked up on the job, then enhanced at MBA programs, which employers can often be induced to pay for. Data also shows that business majors are at the bottom of the totem pole when it comes to development of critical thinking skills in college: </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>[Today’s</a> Business Major - NYTimes.com](<a href=“Today's Business Major - NYTimes.com”>Today's Business Major - NYTimes.com)</p>
<p>EDIT: and, if you follow the link, you’ll also find that business majors score lowest on the GMAT - though there is wide variations among majors within the business realm, with marketing majors dragging the average down and finance majors up with the liberal arts bunch.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Be VERY careful about advising today’s college students on the basis of the same assumptions that we made when we were in college a generation ago. We thought that there was a certain mass of content that we needed to accumulate. Today’s students can accumulate it in seconds online. And any attempt to accumulate current knowledge is inherently short-sighted since the volume of human knowledge is now estimated to double every 18 months. Many of today’s college students will find their lives’ work in fields that do not exist today. Whether you get it through the liberal arts or from some other discipline, you’d better learn to draw understandings from a wide range of viewpoints, critically assess and assimilate them, and make informed decisions on the fly. You’d also better have communication skills that can transcend a single setting, vocation or culture so that you can adapt to the rise of new opportunities or to the closure of your present field. This is an entirely different environment from that of the last century, requiring as much flexibility as students can develop.</p>
<p>^I agreed with everything until I got to the last sentence; I would say that most of what you said (except for the part about online content acquisition) applied in the second half of the 20th Century as well. My first job out of college (at age 30 in 1976) was in an industry that did not exist 10 years earlier.</p>
<p>I agree that college is about expanding your mind academically and socially, to learn for the the sake of learning. Learn from older great minds by day, party with up and coming greats of your own age by night. That’s the theory, anyway. Besides, you won’t get work experience from sitting in History 101; you get it from being on the job.</p>
<p>The problem with college is that people get too caught up in “prestige”, choosing to go to a more expensive private that’s marginally better than the local state school because some ranking system said so. You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you could have gotten for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Gotta give credit where credit is due. Thanks, Good Will Hunting. :)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Try getting a ticket to take your nursing board examination without at least an associate’s degree. And you better hope the new nurse who is shooting a potentially dangerous medication into your IV actually learned something of “real use” at college.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>My MBA program did assume that, at least in theory, and there was a six(IIRC)-course prerequisite track for people coming from non-business majors. But the implementation of the MBA program itself was sorely lacking. There was a required course in cost accounting; it was taught by an accounting adjunct with no experience in cost accounting, who borrowed an exam from someone else, and then couldn’t work some of the problems herself. The business policy course, supposedly the “capstone” of the MBA experience, used the same case book that I had used as an undergrad - but the undergrad course was taught by a full professor with 30+ years of teaching and consulting experience, the MBA course by a graduate assistant. There were a couple of courses that were worthwhile, but they were in my concentration, quantitative techniques, not in the MBA core. A couple of years after I graduated, the MBA program had its accreditation suspended - they eventually made changes and got reaccredited, and the school’s MBA program may now be perfectly acceptable.</p>
<p>I got what I primarily went for - a credential, though as it turned out, because of the turns my consulting practice took, it was a credential more useful for impressing people at parties than for convincing potential clients that they should engage me.</p>