@taxguy, pretty much every single respectable IE department (they’re named differently in different universities) already offers a computational finance/financial engineering concentration/major. And every econ and math department of any size will offer advanced stats courses. And to become an actuary, any deeply quantitative major will do.
Really, the only major field which you want which the elite universities without undergrad b-schools don’t offer in depth is accounting.
@dadx, actually, you could get on the same career track without any lag at all even if your undergrad doesn’t offer a business major. That is, unless you want to become an accountant. To use Northwestern as an example (because I know NU best), there is literally not a single industry or function I can think of which BBA’s enter which an NU undergraduate education can not prepare you well for other than the accounting/audit career path.
I don’t see why an undergraduate business program and a liberal arts program are mutually exclusive. As Xiggi metioned good programs can and do incorporate both. For example Penn (Wharton) requires several liberal arts courses and significant exposure to courses that teaches critcal thinking. So does my alma mater, Georgetown. I was an accounting major yet I remember having to take english, philosophy, theology, history, social science, classics and math classes. We had a solid core requirement of liberal arts classes that taught us critical thinking skills. A good university can incorporate both types of classes.
I think you are right on the money, @Glennu. I have a degree in economics from a top 20 LAC, and I took plenty of classes that didn’t teach me to think any better than the intro statistics classes or cost accounting classes I took in graduate business school. Or introductory finance for that matter which I found more challenging than a lot of my economics classes. In fact, my high school English teacher probably taught me more about thinking than most of my professors in college or graduate school. The educational quality of any course can be very teacher dependent. I think most subject matter can be taught in a very thought provoking way. Don’t tell me business case studies don’t require strong analytical thinking. There’s no reason an undergraduate business school can’t use that type of material.
My younger son is interested in accounting/finance, and I suspect he’ll end up in sales in the end - - but accounting is the language of business - - and I’m fine with him studying that. I don’t think it is any less intellectual than studying say, Spanish. Nor do I think it is as challenging as engineering or physics. And if you are so intellectually gifted that you can attend Harvard, Yale, etc., then I do think the world is wide open to you career wise regardless of your undergraduate course of study. You already know how to think and think deeply and are probably intellectually curious if you are in that category. But for the other 95% of the college age population, I don’t buy that accounting is inferior to economics. It certainly can be and most likely will be rounded out with other classes from the liberal arts.
The issue here is top20 LAC vs. “default major” amarylandmom.
And accounting is rigorous through and through, you can’t “wing it” like some business majors at the undergrad level, so it’s almost never a “default major”.
@MYOS1634, I’m sorry, I may have missed part of the conversation though I thought I read through all these posts, but I’m not totally following. What do you mean by “default major”? Are you referring to just a general business major at the undergraduate level?
Sounds like we agree on accounting.
I guess my (maybe not so well stated) point is that there are plenty of majors in liberal arts that aren’t necessarily the most thought provoking, intellectual pursuits. A lot of the quality is in how the content is delivered, and I believe most content (including business) can be delivered in a way that provokes deep thought. Or not.
Oftentimes, I think the big advantage the top schools have over the next tiers down are the caliber of the student body. I think you can sometimes learn more from the fellow students in class and their questions and discussion then you can from the professor.
@Daddio3 - There are some advantages coming from a big state school graduating 1,500 students. The large state schools pull quite a few more recruiters than smaller privates. These recruiters tend to be more national in scope, offering a wider variety of job postings. Also, the networks for the larger schools are larger as well, especially once you travel outside the geographic area the school is located in. Frankly, if I were a business recruiter making one stop in PA, Penn State would be a better source of talent than Villanova.
As far as the difficulty of individual majors, the joke when I was in school was that accounting majors are failed engineers, finance majors are failed accountants, economics majors are failed finance majors, marketing majors are failed economics majors, and human resource majors are failed marketing majors. There was some truth in that.
@JHS - The CFA and certain other professional certifications are excellent investments that provide a greater ROI than going to a mediocre MBA program. The person that has the discipline and foresight to obtain one of these difficult to achieve certifications, especially if they are in their 20’s, IMHO has a greater chance of success than a similar candidate going to a non-top 40 MBA program.
Nah, the discussion’s been meandering… after all it’s now 14 pages long!
I agree, peer quality matters a lot, especially in a curriculum with many seminars and class discussions, and/or group work is required.
Default major = student doesn’t know what to study, isn’t interested in anything specific, and is in college “to get a job”… picks a general business (or management) major because figures it’ll be “practical” but not as difficult as engineering.
Not the same at all as choosing Wharton, Stern, Mendoza, or CMC (where it’s half business/economics, half liberal arts), not the same as choosing a business field because one is really interested and has plans - in those cases, doing something one is good at leads to a job. The “default major” is frequent in third-tier universities (often the most common major there) and may not lead to a good job, much to the student’s disapointment. This is especialy disappointing if they picked that major over one they liked and were good at, under pressure from misinformed parents or relatives.
If you graduate from a 3rd tier school your options as a poli sci major will not be much better than your fellow. 3rd tier business major. The college size question when overlaid on quality does yield better recruiting on campus. Also most better large schools have a career center just for business majors. Another for engineering etc etc. I know UW and IU Kelley each get over 400 firms on campus recruiting each year just for business majors. PSU likely similar or more.
While that may be true, that is not necessarily a strong argument for majoring in business. If weaker business majors and weaker political science (or some other) majors both have poor job prospects, then it may make more sense to major in something that one likes and is strong at (business, political science, or otherwise). Some might say that majors like engineering, CS, or math/statistics (aiming for finance/actuarial jobs) may be an exception, but probably not really, since they tend to weed out the weaker students in college, rather than letting them get weeded out in the job market after graduation.
At some universities, the business major is popular enough compared to its capacity to be significantly more selective than the rest of the school (either for frosh/transfer admission or entering the major by an already-enrolled student). So the business major at such a school may have some level of eliteness in the view of employers compared to other majors at the same university. But this is not necessarily true for all universities (e.g. a less selective university where business is not additionally selective and is commonly chosen as a “default major”).
What about Brown BEO? It might not be as well-known as Brown itself is, due to the lack of AACSB accreditation (and Brown Prime, Brown’s graduate business school, isn’t accredited either, although Prime has an executive MBA offered jointly with an institution that is AACSB-accredited, part online, part in-person) but it’s still an undergraduate business school (or concentration; in that particular context I tend to confuse the two)…
I would switch accounting with finance, and add “engineers are failed physicists”. Vernon Smith, economist and Nobel Laureate started life as a physics student who switched to EE to avoid a certain course, then switched again to economics. I guess math is the “invisible sieve”.
^yes : as a certificate, but their “foundation” remains a “traditional” major. Business is seen as a good complement, not as a be-all/end-all for job market placement. Then again they know their “brand” is strong enough.
So you have three types
elite, where business and liberal arts complement, typically liberal arts as the foundation and business as the certificate (reverse this at Wharton, Stern, CMC). Students there would feel secure enough in their “elite” status that they wouldn’t worry about “practicality” and more about giving themselves an edge toward specific position in the job market.
first tier, where business is relatively selective and is offered as a full major,: Indiana, PSU, Wisconsin -- can still be a default major but due to "weed out classes", probably not; rigor is probably equal to the other majors but grades in all subjects (major and gen eds) would matter. Some students there may choose business rather than a major they're really interested in because they've been told it's more practical, when in fact internships, a few business classes, and a good use of the career center may have yielded the same professional result, with more satisfaction for them.
"default major", where it's the most common major chosen by students who don't really know what to study and where not much may be expected. Not really "practical" if it yields less reading, less writing, less rigor than other majors (which research shows is the current situation) as business want people with "practical skills" but who also can write well, communicate well, etc.- skills many employers bemoan they can't find.
Accounting ought to be set aside because accredited programs make sure no one is there “by default”, although there may well be middling accounting students pressed into the major by well-meaning relatives, yet who’d have been terrific philosophy majors or Spanish majors or urban studies majors or geography majors…
Is that a comprehensive enough summary ?
Where would you place a business-centric college with excellent placement such as Baruch? What about Babson, Bentley, Bryant?
How come AACSB accreditation is such a poor predictor of academic quality?
@jarjarbinks: essentially, if you want prestige and business, select one of the many schools with business-related certificates: you can get a certificate, then choose whatever “unpractical” major you’re interested in - have you cake and eat it too!
@Canuckguy, in the comments of that link you posted, some commentators made the astute observation that if you just measure change/delta, you may not get the full picture because some majors may attract kids with high critical thinking skills at time zero compared to other majors. In those majors that do, it’s logical that there would be less room for improvement.
Just as an example, if major A attracts kids who are already in the 90th percentile on a test and major B attracts kids who start out in the 20th percentile on a test, it would be fairly easy for majors in major B to have double the improvement of majors in major A while it would be almost impossible for students in major A to improve more than students in major B (unless major B is close to useless at improving whatever the test measures). Yet for any given student, major A may very well be better at improving critical reasoning skills than major B.
Accreditation is a peer review system. Since business departments include a large number of those at low selectivity schools that do not want to weed out most of their students, raising the standards would not be good for those departments. However, the AACSB standards are high enough to eliminate some of the lowest reputation schools.
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