Recent national studies examining the engagement of college undergraduates suggest that traditional business curriculum may fall short in engaging students and preparing them to succeed in the business world after graduation.
According to last year’s National Survey of Student Engagement — in which 572 U.S. and Canadian institutions took part — business students on average spent fewer hours studying than their peers in other popular majors like biology, English or psychology, and were less likely to participate in internships and clubs outside of class.
A collaborative article by The New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education also contended that business majors score lower on the Graduate Management Admission Test than any other major, and in their first two years of college did worse on national writing and reasoning tests. Student disengagement in the field of business administration is at its lowest point, the article said.
The continued emphasis on liberal arts within the Lundquist College of Business, however, may ensure that University business students do not fall into the same patterns of disengagement as their national peers.
“We attract students to the University of Oregon and, thus, to the Lundquist College of Business who are interested in a strong liberal arts education and who seek a business education that is grounded in application of their business skills,” Wendy Mitchell, assistant dean of the business school, said in an email from herself and Lundquist Dean Kees de Kluyver.
Unlike many schools included in the NSSE, the University’s business school does not admit undergraduate students directly as freshmen, Mitchell said. Instead, business students must fulfill prerequisites in literature, writing and science before focusing on accounting, marketing and finance courses.
“The world is changing so fast that we can’t just teach sets of skills. We have to teach creative processes and thinking,” Scott Coltrane, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, said. “A liberal arts education teaches students how to solve problems and to ask the right kinds of questions.”
It’s this ability to problem solve, Coltrane said, that sets the United States apart from nations that focus solely on teaching technical skills.
“It’s the process of discussion and creation of knowledge that has made us so successful,” Coltrane said.
According to the Times article, business students are approaching college more and more as a step in the process for finding a career, and their degree may not even guarantee — as national surveys indicate — that employers favor writing and critical thinking skills over a background in business.
University finance major and senior Tom Donohue said that while interning at a New York City-based Wall Street firm last summer, he worked alongside undergraduate students who had never even taken a business course. Donohue thinks his business knowledge gave him an advantage at the job, but he agreed that the major skills he attained in college — “analyzing a situation and trying to understand what’s happening, making an argument, defending it and making a recommendation on it” — are likely the same as someone who studied English or philosophy.
“Business is just a more applied concept within that,” Donohue said.
The University’s business program is designed to test students’ writing and reasoning skills, Mitchell said, and the business school is one of only 620 schools accredited by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. Students are regularly evaluated through questions and assignments embedded in their courses, and if they are not meeting the required standards by the AACS, courses and teaching techniques are revised until students are up to par, Mitchell said.
The standards for business students are high, Coltrane said, but he agreed that communication and writing skills implicit in an overarching liberal arts education are what employers are looking for.
“Most people in business didn’t major in business,” Coltrane said, referring to some of the University’s most successful alumni in the business world like Ninkasi owner Jamie Floyd, who graduated in 1994 with a degree in sociology. “Liberal arts colleges like this don’t train people for jobs. They train people how to think.”
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