http://www.courier-journal.

com/article/20110707/OPINION04/307070027/Daniel-F-Sullivan-Don-t-major-business

Dont Major In Business

By DANIEL F. SULLIVAN

A fast-accumulating body of evidence including recent research discussed in the book Academically Adrift indicates with great clarity that, for success in a business career, undergraduates should major in a liberal arts discipline, not business. American employers get this. In a 2010 report Raising the Bar: Employers' Views on College Learning in the Wake of the Economic Downturn employers make it clear that they want both knowledge and competence in specific fields and the intellectual and practical skills acquired in liberal education inquiry and analysis; critical and creative thinking; integrative and reflective thinking; written and oral communication; quantitative literacy; information literacy; intercultural understanding; teamwork and problem solving because these learning outcomes are the keys to success in any job, including the jobs that are even now being invented in our rapidly changing economy. What they do not want are employees who have been educated too narrowly, because business leadership today is challenging, multidisciplinary and requires the kinds of higher-order skills that liberal education is about. Research also shows that the learning outcomes employers consider essential are most fully achieved by students in educational environments characterized by high levels of student engagement when, in other words, students are challenged academically in demanding courses that require significant amounts of time on task; experience high levels of purposeful, active and collaborative learning; enjoy quality interactions with faculty around their academic work; experience the enrichment of such opportunities as well-designed internships, collaborative research with faculty members and study of other cultures (abroad or in the U.S.); and benefit from supportive campus environments. But David Glenn, writing recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, reports that all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in ... undergraduate business education. 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 of class. Glenn also cites the important research by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa reported in Academically Adrift, noting that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college, and reports further that, when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major. Despite this evidence, about 20 percent of undergraduates major in business, making it the single largest undergraduate major. They do so, I assume, because they are convinced that it will increase their chances at a first job. Like it or not, specialization produces performance, said a reader commenting on an article about this topic by Wesleyan University President Michael Roth in a recent issue of the Chronicle of

Higher Education. There are some institutions where an undergraduate business education is thoughtfully and tightly married to the liberal arts to the benefit of each, where students explicitly preparing for a career in business also receive a demanding liberal education, but these situations are all too rare. What we need, I believe, is for America's most significant business leaders to speak clearly about this to students about to go off to college. It is an enormous challenge for those of us in higher education leadership to break through an anxiety-fueled policy and public dialogue that too often treats college as a 21st century version of trade school when our nation's economic vitality depends on our producing very different results vastly increased numbers of college graduates with a liberal education who really can lead businesses to success in the extremely competitive global political economy of today. Daniel F. Sullivan is president emeritus of St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y.