Can I Major in Liberal Arts in a Business School
Why America's Business organization Majors Are in Desperate Need of a Liberal-Arts Education
Their degrees may help them secure entry-level jobs, just to advance in their careers, they'll need much more than technical skills.
American undergraduates are flocking to business programs, and finding enough of entry-level opportunities. Merely when businesses go hunting for CEOs or managers, "they will say, a couple of decades out, that I'k looking for a liberal arts grad," said Judy Samuelson, executive director of the Aspen Institute's Business and Society Program.
That presents a growing challenge to colleges and universities. Students are clamoring for degrees that will assistance them secure jobs in a shifting economy, only to succeed in the long term, they'll require an education that allows them to grow, conform, and contribute as citizens—and to build successful careers. And it's why many schools are shaking up their curricula to ensure that undergraduate business majors receive something they may not even know they need—a rigorous liberal-arts educational activity.
They're trying to solve a rapidly growing problem. Nearly one in five bachelor'south degrees earned in the Usa is a business caste, co-ordinate to the latest statistics from the Department of Education. And that may actually understate the growth of business teaching—it doesn't account for undergraduate minors, nor for the students who major in economics at schools where business degrees aren't on offer. Merely a panel of educators chastened by Samuelson at the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is co-hosted by the Aspen Plant and The Atlantic, emphasized the need to ensure that these degrees provide a robust education. (The panel was fatigued from participants in the Aspen Undergraduate Business Educational activity Consortium, an initiative that's promoting the tighter integration of the liberal arts into business concern curricula.)
At that place's good reason for their concern. Put simply, business majors seem to be graduating with some of the technical skills they'll need to secure jobs, but without having made the gains in writing or disquisitional-thinking skills they'll require to succeed over the course of their careers, or to adapt every bit their technical skills become outdated and the nature of the opportunities they take shifts over time.
A 2014 report of the Collegiate Learning Assessment test—administered to some 13,000 undergraduates as they entered and exited university—found that business, health, and education majors substantially underperformed students in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and engineering. The authors so adapted their results to account for the academic abilities of students entering these majors—and found that business organisation and education majors however showed substantially lower gains in writing, circuitous reasoning, and critical thinking by the fourth dimension they'd graduated.
Those are the weaknesses that a liberal-arts education can address. "Liberal arts majors … are the students who take the agile minds, who are asking the big questions," said Erika Walker, an assistant dean at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Concern. That, she said, was a mindset that all students require. "What we demand to strive to attain for the students who aren't asking the big questions is: challenge yourselves."
Finding workers who ask those questions tin pay off—literally—for businesses. "Nosotros take become and then myopic in solving business problems that we don't remember about those bug from the perspective of other disciplines," said Charles Iacovou, dean of the school of business at Wake Forest University. And that sort of context offers a disquisitional competitive border, even if not all undergraduates understand that. "More reflective teaching is the kind of thing they button dorsum on," Walker said. "But this is what businesses are telling u.s. they need."
Businesses want workers who have "the ability to think, the ability to write, the power to understand the cultural or historical context of whatever business decision they're making," added Rachel Reiser, assistant dean at Boston University's Questrom School of Concern. If undergraduates desire to observe success, they demand to chief those skills. "Nosotros're trying to help them empathize there may be so much more than to a concern education," Walker said.
And beyond the career advantages that these skills confer, there's a broader case for offering a liberal-arts education to the hundreds of thousands of students who graduate every yr with business concern degrees. Information technology doesn't just increase their economic competitiveness, information technology besides strengthens their ability to contribute to the broader order, and to lead fulfilling lives. "We as educational institutions have ii jobs: to prepare them to enter the profession simply likewise to set up them as human beings and every bit citizens," Iacovou said.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/why-americas-business-majors-are-in-desperate-need-of-a-liberal-arts-education/489209/
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