It used to be that the typical undergraduate business school program stuck pretty closely to a narrow curriculum heavily weighted in management, sales and finance, or “learning how to do business,” says Jim Otteson, executive director of the BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
Many schools still do stick to that script. But beyond making sure future moguls leave with all the necessary nuts and bolts, there’s a movement gaining ground to equip them with a much broader skill set and the bigger picture.
The goal? To turn out grads who are well-rounded, can explain complex concepts as handily as statistics, and who are good at connecting dots — beyond those on a graph — to solve problems.
The approaches colleges and universities are taking range from redesigning the curriculum or adding a brand new major to reimagining individual courses.
[See the rankings of the Best Undergraduate Business Programs.]
In 2014, for instance, the University of Michigan‘s Stephen M. Ross School of Business unveiled its new MERGE program, short for Multidisciplinary Exploration and Rigorous Guided Education.
Rather than begin with the typical survey course covering the basics of economics, finance, operations and marketing, business majors now take a new introductory course called Business and Leaders: The Positive Differences. The point, through discussion, research projects and the insights of guest speakers, is for students to explore business’s proper place in society as well as what role they might want to play, says Alison Davis-Blake, Ross’ dean.
One issue considered by his class, recalls Joe Kuderer, a junior from Eden Prairie, Minnesota, who hopes to go into corporate finance or wealth management, was whether business should “just be focused on profits” or also on giving back to the community. The perspective he gained from the discussions “put me in the right frame of mind for the rest of my classes,” he says.
At the Stern School of Business at New York University, students can take up to half of their courses in the College of Arts & Sciences. This builds on a set of required bigger-picture courses called the Social Impact Core.
A more values-oriented exploration is also underway at Western New England University in Massachusetts, where the aim is to send graduates into the world “with a much broader understanding of their role as business leaders,” says Jeanie Forray, chair of the management department in the College of Business. Students take approximately half of their courses from outside the business program and get a big dose of “the issues of ethics, social responsibility and environmental concerns,” she says.
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One feature of the program: internships with local nonprofits. Some students might help a company research and analyze the distribution of services in an underserved community. Others may spend a year on the board of directors of Habitat for Humanity, say, or Children’s Study Home, which provides educational and other services to families and kids with special needs.
The approach taken by St. Lawrence University in New York, which introduced a business in the liberal arts major in 2014, is to require all participants to complete a second major. They take a set of seven core courses — including economics, accounting, statistics and a philosophy course called Reasoning — designed to ground them in how markets and corporations work and to foster “the ability to make decisions under uncertainty,” and to evaluate “the quality and relevance of evidence.”
Sarah Pyc, one of the first students to sign up for the new major and now a senior, expects competition for jobs to be fierce when she graduates, especially for high-paying positions. But she’s convinced that “social skills, analytical thinking and the ability to present yourself in a positive light” will be important factors setting the winners apart.
Students at business-focused Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts, have a couple of ways to broaden their horizons. Business majors can double up, as St. Lawrence students do, by pursuing a second major in liberal studies. It’s possible as well to choose a bachelor of arts degree and add a major or minor in business studies.
Also, in 2014 the school introduced several six-credit “fusion” courses that combine a business course with an arts and science course to shift perspectives.
[Follow these three tips to manage a double major.]
Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond in Virginia is now experimenting with adding paired classes, one in the humanities and one on a business topic, based on a successful linkage a couple years ago of Victorian literature with government accounting.
The trend toward offering a more liberal studies-oriented business degree is turning out to be quite attractive to parents, says Michigan’s Davis-Blake. “Parents are often caught between wanting their children to have a broad-based education that will expand their minds and vision, and having a narrow technical education that will help them get a job,” she says. The goal, she says, is to do a much better job of providing both.
This story is excerpted from the U.S. News “Best Colleges 2016” guidebook, which features in-depth articles, rankings and data.
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