Business Educators Struggle to Put Students to Work
By David Glenn
The Chrnoicle of Higher Education
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| Arielle Retting for The New York Times |
Paul M. Mason does not give his business students the same exams he gave 10 or 15 years ago. "Not many of them would pass," he says.
Mr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida, believes his students are just as intelligent as they've always been. But many of them don't read their textbooks, or do much of anything else that their parents would have called studying. "We used to complain that K-12 schools didn't hold students to high standards," he says with a sigh. "And here we are doing the same thing ourselves."
That might sound like a kids-these-days lament, but all evidence suggests that student disengagement is at its worst in Mr. Mason's domain: 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 class. In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major.
, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major.
I don't understand why nobody comments on these links. Where are all the people who read this page. Or is that just bullshit.
ReplyDeleteAre there any business profs on CM? I've never understood business as a scholarly discipline. That is, I do understand that it could be fascinating as a scholarly discipline - like economics - but is that how it's taught?
ReplyDelete11 hours a week!?!?!
ReplyDeleteLuxury.
If they do no read their textbooks they do not learn, therefore they are NOT as smart as people in their parents generation. They are just lazier than their parents generation.
ReplyDeleteCM bizprof here.
ReplyDeleteThe excessive instrumentality described in the article certainly is a problem in my school. It can be very frustrating trying to light a spark of intellectual and scholarly curiosity among students who just want to get their piece of paper with the minimum effort, so they can then go out and make fat bonuses doing the same minimal work in some corporation.
But of course there are always a few each semester that keep me sane. Maybe twenty or so that have their brains turned on and leave here able to think differently than when they arrived, and who might actually do something interesting in the business realm of society when they graduate. And there's usually one or two students who actually rise to the intellectual challenges I lay before them, who are at university for all the right, non-job-seeking reasons.
But the vast majority are just going through the motions - they've been complete sold on the line that you must have a degree of some sort to survive in a modern economy, but they have no real interest in learning anything. They're in B-school because it looks easier than engineering, and promises to pay more than a BA in psych. They can be very creative in how they dodge making any of the required efforts. This is a real loss. If they put into their studies even a fraction of the effort they put into cheating and snowflakery, they could really accomplish something. Alas, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it think.
The thing that puzzles me is that the business world actually strikes me as a very good example of a milieu in which you need to employ critical thinking skills, to realize that the received wisdom will become untrue over time, to figure out how to gather accurate data, etc., etc. I often find myself using business-based examples in class (e.g. a hotelier whose picture of the "business traveler"'s needs didn't change with the advent of female business travelers would miss out on a lucrative market; a proposal is like a business plan in needing to rest on a good deal of already-accomplished research to be effective), partly because they're effective, but also because I'm pretty sure they're true. I may not be fascinated with the world of profit-focused capitalism myself, but I have to agree it's potentially interesting, and intellectually stimulating, and absolutely central to the workings of the nation and the world. Or maybe it's the economists who actually study this stuff in the ways I'm thinking of?
ReplyDelete"In their new book, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, the sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college."
ReplyDeleteIn many (most) biz programs, students take very few or no biz classes during their first two years. Some uni's don't even classify students as "business" until their third year.
The article does a reasonable job pointing out the dichotomy between the qualitative nature of management and marketing as compared to the more quantitative nature of finance and accounting (and management information systems and operations management, which get little mention in the article).