For more than a century, business schools have tried to gauge how important a liberal-arts background is to functioning in the marketplace. The question now has renewed urgency. Political volatility and the interwoven global economy, the revolution in information technology, and renewed attention to corporate ethics and transparency have all recently buffeted the corporate world, and sparked reconsideration of whether business schools are properly preparing their students to enter it.
In his 1983 book, The Business School in the 1980s: Liberalism Versus Vocationalism, Paul S. Hugstad relates the structure of the business curriculum to the field’s history. Although liberal-arts institutions began to appear in this country in the late 17th century, business schools, along with other professional schools, evolved more slowly. The first collegiate business school (Wharton) was established in 1881 at the University of Pennsylvania to educate men from wealthy families in the areas of government and business. Originally housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, it focused on developing the moral character and general intellect of the students -- not simply on vocational or professional training. Using a similar approach, the Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance at Dartmouth College, established in 1900, used faculty members in political science, history, sociology, and rhetoric to teach many of its first-year courses in a curriculum that emphasized general management.
During the early 1900s, rapid industrialization produced an increased demand for business managers. Schools, such as Babson College (established in 1919), were founded on the principle that practical experience was essential to a business education. Between 1920 and 1928, the total number of students who earned undergraduate business degrees increased from approximately 1,600 to more than 6,600 (83 of whom were women). During the 1930s and ‘40s, the depressed economy and limited number of job opportunities helped maintain the emphasis on marketable business skills. By 1940, there were 120 business schools in the United States, 53 of which belonged to the American Assembly of Collegiate Schools of Business, which was formed in 1916 to promote and improve higher business education in North America.
The demand for a business education grew rapidly during the 1940s, and in 1950 more than 70,000 undergraduate business degrees were granted. Following those decades of expansion, demand began to fall off in the 1950s, triggering a re-examination of what constituted a business education. Two major studies in 1959, financed by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, were critical of the extreme focus on management training rather than critical thinking. They also highlighted the imbalance between undergraduate and graduate degrees (in 1958, less than 10 percent of business degrees were at the graduate level), suggesting an alarming attrition from the academic business pipeline. The foundations were concerned that while students were learning management skills at the undergraduate level, practicing managers had not adequately developed their general analytical and critical thinking and were not continuing their educations.
Both reports recommended expanding the general-education, or liberal-arts, component of the undergraduate business degree. Robert A. Gordon and James E. Howell, in the Ford Foundation report, specifically stated that a college business education “should emphasize the development of basic problem-solving and organizational skills and socially constructive attitudes,” and suggested that as much as 50 percent of the baccalaureate work should be in the area of general education. The reports also recommended shifting specialization to the master’s business programs.
Thus the 1960s witnessed the “liberalization” of business schools and the hiring of business faculty members from a broader set of disciplines, such as economics, history, law, and psychology. Business executives and faculty members alike recognized the need for traditional “liberal” qualities in business leaders, such as social awareness, historical perspective, moral understanding, and scientific competence.
The debate between liberalism and vocationalism in business education raged on into the 1970s and ‘80s, and that period came to be called the “new vocationalism” -- a period of high growth in enrollments for professional schools. Baby boomers -- including women in increasing numbers -- were now competing for jobs and demanding marketable skills. By 1980, 20 percent of all baccalaureate degrees were in business, and women earned 35 percent of undergraduate business degrees and 25 percent of M.B.A. degrees from AACSB-accredited schools. The 1970s saw the development of specialized, or career-oriented, programs at the major business schools. Those programs were streamlined and aimed at preparing students for specific career tracks. Emphasis was on employment -- not broad-based education. Several publications began to rank the business schools, and one of the criteria was success in students’ job placements.
In response to rising enrollment and the variety of specialized programs, the AACSB began to play a greater role in trying to define and control the business-school curriculum. A survey in the early ‘80s asked deans of liberal-arts and business programs, as well as corporate executives, about their views of the available business training. Deans at both types of institutions agreed that students could benefit from a broad liberal-arts perspective, but the corporate participants were not as convinced. Academic and corporate respondents felt that, in preparation for a career in business, a business major combined with a liberal-arts minor was more desirable than a liberal-arts background alone, or than a liberal-arts major with a business minor. Nearly all respondents felt that a background in science or engineering was among the most desirable educational backgrounds for students pursuing a business career.
The 1992 standards issued by AACSB International (which now stands for the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, and has members outside the United States) included a requirement that 50 percent of the baccalaureate students’ time be spent studying “general content,” a sobriquet for the liberal arts. The 2003 Standards replaced that requirement with a list of expected competencies to be taught in an undergraduate program, including communication and analytical skills, ethical understanding and reasoning, a grasp of information technology, multicultural awareness, and reflective thinking. Each program is expected to design a set of goals consistent with its mission that include those competencies in the curriculum in a measurable way, reflecting another AACSB emphasis: the need for better assessment tools.
For example, Babson, in addition to 64 credits of business courses, requires all undergraduates to complete a nine-credit core in mathematics and statistics, six credits of science, four credits of law, and 45 credits in additional liberal-arts courses. Those courses are developed around a set of 27 core competencies in conjunction with AACSB guidelines.
A few undergraduate business institutions -- for example, McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia, and Babson -- have developed innovative programs that integrate material across disciplines and use a team-based approach. Those programs emphasize the development of critical and analytical skills in conjunction with major business subjects, like finance, marketing, and operations management, to enhance students’ problem solving and decision making.
While many current business programs include critical-thinking skills culled from the liberal arts, the next step is, like Virginia and Babson, to integrate those capabilities with more practical business applications. Ideally, programs should encourage students to major in business while minoring in a liberal-arts discipline, to explore both arenas without having to choose too early between them. Toward that end, there are some key questions administrators should ask in designing their business curricula:
- Does the curriculum give students a cross-cultural, historical perspective to lead in today’s global corporations? Business schools need to expand study-abroad and other international learning opportunities traditionally emphasized in liberal-arts programs.
- Is there adequate emphasis on writing and speaking about quantitative information in a qualitative context?
- Are students being prepared to launch and manage enterprises that build on innovative ideas and technological revolutions?
- Are students learning about the legal, ethical, and financial implications of decision making?
We hope the pendulum between liberal-arts emphasis and vocationalism in business schools is swinging back toward a broad curriculum, or, better yet, ceasing to swing at all. Business students will be asked to cope with cultural, technological, economic, and ethical complexities undreamed of in the mid-century age of the finite business skill set. In teaching the next generations of managers, liberal-arts and business faculties must learn their own management lesson: that their key to success is imaginative integration.
Norean Radke Sharpe is an associate professor of statistics and operations research, and Gordon D. Prichett a professor of mathematics, at Babson College.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 30, Page B19