A couple of weeks back, I went to my 30th reunion dinner for the Sloan School of Management at MIT, where I received a Master’s of Science in Management in those way-back days when MIT oh so quaintly didn’t award an MBA. Interestingly, we seemed to have been awarded MBA’s ex post facto. Our name tags listed our class year and read “MBA”.
We were a small class – not much over 100 students – and about 30-35 came back, from all over, for the event, which was great fun (as had been our 25th reunion). Our small size made us pretty tight, as did the accommodations we had back in the day. Sloan has expanded greatly since our time there –the are more students and mo’ better space – and, while I didn’t head over to MIT to see the new building, I suspect that there are more gathering spaces for students than we had. The fact that, other than the library, the only place to hang between classes was the area outside the administrative offices, where there were two beat up round tables. So we all got to know each other pretty well.
Much of our reminiscing was, of course, about the courses we took. Sloan – at least when I was there – had a quantitative bent. You had to pass a calculus exam to qualify to take the intro economics course, which was required; if you failed, you had to take some remedial math and pre-intro econ. Fortunately, I skin-of-my-teethed it on the calculus qualifier. Whew! Even in marketing, things could get pretty wonky. One of my concentrations was in “applied marketing”, which was mostly about marketing (statistical) analysis.
By business school standards, this was all pretty rigorous.
Not that there weren’t gut courses. In fact, one of the best courses I took was “Business Ethics.” Certainly a gut (especially at Sloan) in that nothing in it made your head explode. But the course required reading, thinking and writing, so I loved it.
When we were hanging around those round tables, of course, we were often times pretty stressed.
But someone could always be counted on to remind us that was “only” business school – not nuclear physics, neurobiology, or electrical engineering.
On the other hand, in my case, it was a lot harder (mentally, if not physically) than waiting tables at Durgin-Park.
My Sloan reunion reminded me that, a while back, The New York Times had an interesting article, done in conjunction with The Chronicle of Higher Education, on what a “gut” undergraduate major business is, once you’re out of the realm of the top undergraduate business schools.
Business is the “default” major for many, and a lot of business students are disengaged. They’re not reading textbooks, they’re texting - just doing their time until they can graduate with their “practical” degree.
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. …And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.
Well, I don’t find the not studying all that shocking, but scoring lower on the GMAT? Wouldn’t you think that a business major would have absorbed just a tad more business knowledge than your average sociology or English major?
Worse than their doping it on the GMATs is the fact that there are so many of these business majors.
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.
This is not a recent phenomenon.
… 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.
The squishiness of the undergraduate business degree doesn’t hold for the elite business programs, like Wharton and Babson.
Still, most of the undergraduate business majors aren’t matriculating at Wharton, Babson, or one of the other Top 50/Top Tier programs where there’s plenty of rigor and the students work hard.
One senior majoring in business at a lower end school said:
“A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”
As for how much time he spends hitting the books:
“Well, this week I don’t have any tests, so probably zero,” he says. “Next week I’ll have a test, so maybe 10 hours then.”
He adds: “It seems like now, every take-home test you get, you can just go and Google. If the question is from a test bank, you can just type the text in, and somebody out there will have it and you can just use that.”
This is not senioritis, he says: this is the way all four years have been. In a typical day, “I just play sports, maybe go to the gym. Eat. Probably drink a little bit. Just kind of goof around all day.” He says his grade-point average is 3.3.
Now, I am not going to say that I exactly killed myself as an undergraduate sociology major, but I can pretty much guarantee that there were no weeks when I spent zero hours reading/writing/studying, and damned few where I did as few as ten. If you’re just googling to find questions and answers in a test bank, well, what’s the point of even pretending that part of the function that college should serve is that you actually learn something that you didn’t know before you got there (other than how to compute how much to charge for a kegger).
I can’t say that I’m at that surprised that so many business majors are a waste. That said, two of the most successful business men I know were undergraduate business majors, back in the day. (Both at Top Tier schools.)
But as a future senior citizen who’s counting on the economy holding together, I’m somewhat aghast that so many colleges are churning out so many graduates who can’t “write coherently, think creatively and analyze quantitative data,” which is what employers say they want.
A mind used to be a terrible thing to waste. Maybe it still is.
Anyway, I suspect that the next couple of decades are going to shake out the entire higher education business, business undergraduate major or not.
A college education is a terrible thing to waste on googling for canned answers to canned questions.
Makes me kind of happy to have held off on that business school education until after I’d gone the entirely impractical sociology, political science, and whatever else struck me as interesting academic route. And makes me kind of happy that, when I did go to B-school, it was kind of hard. We really did have to work, even if we did spend an awful lot of time hanging around those scarred, round tables just getting to know each other.
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