The Default Major: Skating Through B-School - The New York Times - "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 bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in the United States, making it the most popular field of study... 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 Coase’s theory of the firm.“Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters,” says Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School who is a prominent critic of the field. It’s an attitude that Dr. Khurana first saw in M.B.A. programs but has migrated, he says, to the undergraduate level. Second, in management and marketing, no strong consensus has emerged about what students ought to learn or how they ought to learn it. And finally, with large student-faculty ratios and no lab equipment, business has historically been cheaper to operate than most departments... business students’ scores improved less than any other group’s. Communication, education and social-work majors had slightly better gains; humanities, social science, and science and engineering students saw much stronger improvement.What accounts for those gaps? Dr. Arum and Dr. Roksa point to sheer time on task. Gains on the C.L.A. closely parallel the amount of time students reported spending on homework. Another explanation is the heavy prevalence of group assignments in business courses: the more time students spent studying in groups, the weaker their gains in the kinds of skills the C.L.A. measures... The pedagogical theory is that managers need to function in groups, so a management education without such experiences would be like medical training without a residency. While some group projects are genuinely challenging, the consensus among students and professors is that they are one of the elements of business that make it easy to skate through college. Donald R. Bacon, a business professor at the University of Denver, studied group projects at his institution and found a perverse dynamic: the groups that functioned most smoothly were often the ones where the least learning occurred. That’s because students divided up the tasks in ways they felt comfortable with. The math whiz would do the statistical work, the English minor drafted the analysis. And then there’s the most common complaint about groups: some shoulder all the work, the rest do nothing... he estimates that a third of students in the business school don’t engage with their schoolwork. At Radford, seniors in business invest on average 3.64 hours a week preparing for class... It is near-universal student folklore that accounting and finance are where the hard work happens... For a career-oriented major, management strikes many business educators as too theoretical and amorphous — a potpourri of psychology, economics, game theory, ethics and international relations... he developed a game-theory model of the “market” for courses. The model predicts that, over time, courses will inexorably become easier as students (even the conscientious ones) choose courses where they can expect higher grades, and professors (even the most dedicated) turn to strategies that they expect will improve their student evaluations.It’s a simplified model — it assumes students are motivated only by grades and instructors by evaluations. But Dr. Mason believes it offers a fair approximation of reality. In a 2003 paper in the Economics of Education Review, he buttressed that model with a national survey of 259 business professors who had been teaching for at least 10 years. On average, respondents said they had reduced the math and analytic-thinking requirements in their courses. In exchange, they had increased the number of requirements related to computer skills and group presentations. Dr. Mason says that without some kind of hard constraint — like the licensure tests that accounting and finance students must face — courses inexorably become less rigorous.And what about employers? What do they want?According to national surveys, they want to hire 22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively and analyze quantitative data, and they’re perfectly happy to hire English or biology majors. Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors."
Business majors: College's worst slackers? - "Ever wonder why business is the most popular college major in the United States?Maybe it's because business majors have the most fun... Business majors, according to the survey, studied the least among college students. The average business student studied just 14 hours a week. In contrast, engineering students, the hardest workers on college campuses, studied 19 hours a week"
Abolish the Business Major! - "the growth of the business major inflicts a significant cost on colleges and the students they serve. In an era in which calls to reform higher education are rampant, eliminating the undergraduate business major is one simple reform that would dramatically benefit both colleges and their students. While this change would not require the kind of disruption reformers sometimes seek, it would improve student learning outcomes and refocus colleges on their core mission.Many of the students choosing to major in business and related degrees presumably believe it will lead to higher salaries... The Chronicle’s 2014 Almanac concluded that preprofessional majors initially make more than academic majors, but that by midcareer the gap has largely been erased. The Hamilton Project found almost no difference in median lifetime earnings between chemistry, political science, marketing, and business management and administration majors. An analysis by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) concluded that over one’s career, median annual earnings for humanities majors and professional/preprofessional majors are almost exactly the same, whereas majors in the sciences and mathematics tend to make more. At their peak earnings, humanities majors, the study found, make more than professional/preprofessional majors... gender may shape future earnings more than college major. As Benjamin Schmidt noted, “the difference between humanities majors and science majors, in median income and unemployment, seems to be no more than the difference between residents of Virginia and North Carolina. If someone told to me not to move to Charlotte because no one there can make a living, I would never take them seriously. But worried relatives express the same concerns about classics majors every day, with no sounder evidence.” The data are not only contradictory, but also messy. It’s not clear, for example, whether majoring in business leads to higher salaries, or whether other factors are more important... The most important complicating factor, however, is self-selection... The evidence suggests there is no reason to believe majoring in the liberal arts and sciences will have a negative impact on earning potential. Indeed, majoring in the arts and sciences may actually improve graduates’ prospects. According to an AAC&U study, employers overwhelmingly desire college students with a liberal education, both for the kinds of knowledge and perspectives such an education offers and because of the higher-end skills it develops.Employers have been saying this for a long time. Back in 1953, John L. McCaffrey, who was then president of International Harvester, stated that a business graduate’s perspective tends to be too narrow, and therefore he “does not see overall effects on the business.” McCaffrey encouraged engineering and technical schools “to give a larger part in their courses to the liberal-arts subjects” because business leaders needed a “rounded education.” In 1960, William Benton, a partner in an advertising firm, admitted that as “a student at Yale forty years ago, I specialized in a mishmash labeled ‘Finance’ — to my everlasting regret.” Business programs “too often are a waste — of time, money, and the priceless opportunity to prepare for successful careers.”... For Benton, “even four years of Latin are more useful than a once-over-lightly course in production or merchandising.” This leads to the second major weakness of the undergraduate business degree: It is less likely to foster the skills that employers value. In Academically Adrift (University of Chicago Press, 2011), the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa found that students taking courses in the arts and sciences produce significantly greater gains in critical thinking (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment) than do business majors. They attribute the result to the fact that students in the sciences study the most hours, and students in the humanities read and write the most... The third, and most important, reason to abandon the business major is because business majors are antithetical to college education and unworthy of a college degree even if it could be proved that they do produce higher salaries. College students ought to study the liberal arts and sciences because they provide the knowledge, skills, and virtues that are necessary both for preparing people to be effective citizens and leaders and productive participants in the work force, as well as to further their own learning. While there may be utilitarian arguments for majoring in business, colleges must remain true to their own internal purposes... A college graduate ought to be a different kind of person than someone who did not attend college... The business major is for students who want a college degree without a college education. The philosopher Tal Brewer has written that the very notion of business school is an “oxymoron.”
