Is Business Undergraduate Major justified?
Before answering this quesiton, ask yourself this one should a high school offer business major? Or even preference of business, as a possible future inclination? I am sure you know how most people would reply.
Then, how about businesss as a major in college, for undergraduates?
Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field, according to the most recent National Survey of Student Engagement: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class. In their new book Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.
This is not a small corner of academe. The family of majors under the business umbrella including finance, accounting, marketing, management and general business accounts for just over 20 percent, or more than 325,000, of all bachelors degrees awarded annually in the United States, making it the most popular field of study.
Brand-name programs the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business, and a few dozen others are full of students pulling 70-hour weeks, if only to impress the elite finance and consulting firms they aspire to join. But get much below BusinessWeeks top 50, and youll hear pervasive anxiety about student apathy, especially in soft fields like management and marketing, which account for the majority of business majors.
Scholars in the field point to three sources of trouble. First, as long ago as 1959, a Ford Foundation report warned that too many undergraduate business students chose their majors by default. Business programs also attract more than their share of students who approach college in purely instrumental terms, as a plausible path to a job, not out of curiosity about, say, Ronald Coases theory of the firm.