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July 31, 2007

The Tortoise, the Hare, and a Better Approach to Business Education
By Robyne Hart, Hanover College

In May 2007, I was invited to speak at The Council of Independent College’s conference on business education due to my role in helping create the Center for Business Preparation (CBP) at Hanover College. My presentation described Hanover College’s increased commitment to business education that occurred with the elimination of the business major. I remember hearing a few gasps followed by perplexed looks from the audience comprised predominantly of business faculty. This response reinforced my perception that Hanover’s approach is unique and incredibly important. Our first class of students graduated in May with a combination of the liberal arts major and the CBP program. The feedback from business leaders, potential employers and students has affirmed this decision.

Two different approaches are currently being taken to address the issues surrounding a liberal education and business preparation. Colleges and universities without a business major tend to utilize internship experiences to show prospective students and anxious parents that students will be marketable after graduation. Many institutions with a business major add a poorly integrated liberal arts element to demonstrate their support of the institution’s liberal arts mission. At Hanover College we believe that these incremental fixes are fundamentally flawed. Incremental fixes are flawed because they further confuse the message about the crucial role liberal education plays in career preparation. Simply adding internships neither fully address students’ need to understand and explore careers nor fully enhances their marketability. Trying to make a business major “more like the liberal arts” undermines the fundamental purposes of both. Both approaches are flawed because they are based upon what has worked in the past rather than what is needed for the future.

It is only by understanding and embracing the notion that liberal education and business preparation are fundamentally different but complementary that we can create an experience that best serves our students and the broader community. A liberal education provides students a deeper understanding of the world, while building a set of foundational skills that employers cannot readily teach. This is accomplished by challenging students to think, evaluate, debate, synthesize, and communicate ideas and arguments. Business requires the practical application of these skills and particular types of knowledge to further the organization’s mission (be it for-profit, not-for-profit or governmental). Since undergraduate students have little or no practical experience, business preparation must go beyond simply teaching business theory and terminology.

Hanover’s business major was the College’s largest major. Over the years Hanover attempted to make it more “liberal arts” by adding course requirements in Economics. Those efforts did little to help students prepare for careers. A strategic look at the College’s curriculum beginning five years ago provided an opportunity to completely rethink business education.

The CBP curriculum intentionally complements a liberal education and each scholar’s liberal arts major. It builds upon the liberal arts’ strengths and focuses on the “must haves” for any career whether non-profit, for profit or government. The curriculum is comprised of six CBP courses and two cognates in Economics and Statistics that can satisfy degree requirements as well. Within the six CBP courses there are three core courses the first of which is Management Concepts that provides a framework for how to deal with people resources. The Financial Decision Making course integrates Accounting and Finance concepts to help students understand how to utilize financial resources. The last core course is Business Strategy which serves as the capstone course where students understand how the prior resources fit together by serving as consultants and complete a strategic audit for a business. Every scholar in the CBP is guaranteed a project-based Internship customized to connect their major with their career goals. The final two courses are electives which the scholars have a voice in selecting that provide an opportunity to go deeper into a specific aspect of business.

Courses emphasize experiential learning through case studies, sessions with business leaders, and consulting engagements. As a result, CBP scholars have actual experience combining the liberal arts with practical business skills. When they enter their first job after graduation, CBP scholars have already applied skills related to critical thinking, evidence development, problem solving, and effective argumentation. These scholars immediately become important contributors to the organization.

Business education in the past can be described by the fable of the tortoise and the hare; the vocationally-trained graduate was fast out of the gate, while the liberally-educated person was often slower, needing time to learn technical aspects of a job. However, as the race went on, the liberally-educated person learned quickly and the liberal arts foundation enabled the individual to eventually win the race. What Hanover has done with the CBP is give the tortoise a dose of steroids. Our students are no longer slow out of the gate. They understand the context and basic theories of business, have practice applying them, and have multiple examples of documented experience, so they get out of the gate faster than the hare and continue to pull ahead throughout the race.

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Professional Education and the Liberal Arts Professor Hart's description and rationale for Hanover's innovative Center for Business Preparation address a question that is being studied from the opposite vantage point by a Teagle consortium consisting of Hampshire College, Berea College, Cornell College, Smith College, Warren Wilson College, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute: we are interested in some of the ways that liberal arts institutions might do more to prepare their students for a life of work. In this regard, I was stuck by one of the central analytical oppositions in Professor Hart's piece: "It is only by understanding and embracing the notion that liberal education and business preparation are fundamentally different but complementary that we can create an experience that best serves our students and the broader community. A liberal education provides students a deeper understanding of the world, while building a set of foundational skills that employers cannot readily teach. This is accomplished by challenging students to think, evaluate, debate, synthesize, and communicate ideas and arguments. Business requires the practical application of these skills and particular types of knowledge to further the organization’s mission (be it for-profit, not-for-profit or governmental). Since undergraduate students have little or no practical experience, business preparation must go beyond simply teaching business theory and terminology." It may be true that students at some liberal arts colleges "...have little or no practical experience..." but this is not something of which we should be proud. I acknowledge that there is a traditional--but limited, and out-of-date--conception of the liberal arts on which it is permissible to pursue knowledge for "its own sake" (whatever that means). But the schools in our consortium are exploring ways to provide students with opportunities to apply what they are learning outside the classroom (and what they learn in practical experience outside the classroom within the classroom). In this spirit, David Paris has written about the need for a more encompassing view of undergraduate education: a "pragmatic 'both-and'" approach on which traditional liberal arts outcomes--for example, Hart's thinking, evaluating, and debating--are pursued in a broader context that includes "formal training or practical studies"-- areas of study, I note, that are normally more closely associated with professional training (See "The Academics Lament and the Traditional Liberal Arts" LiberalArts Online, V. 7 N. 3). In closing, I want to raise a more provocative possibility: are the goals associated with being "business ready" really so different than those espoused within the liberal arts? Once we have factored out the (I have argued) misleading opposition between theory and practice, what else distinguishes the two domains? The Business-Higher Education Forum offers the following list of skills and attributes that are required for "high performance jobs": leadership, teamwork, problem solving, time management, self-management, adaptability, analytical thinking, global consciousness, and basic communications (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) (from "Spanning the Chasm: A Blueprint for Action"). To those of us at liberal arts colleges, this list seems quite familiar. We might name a few things differently--"collaborative learning" for "teamwork," for example--but these are surely some of the goals that we claim as our own. Ironically, in the view of the Business-Education Forum, however, these are areas of competence in which our students are "severely lacking." If this is true, students may be justified in turning to professional schools to acquire these skills, and if it is not, liberal arts institutions have a serious problem of perception, at the very least. So, by all means, let's continue to pursue the innovative path Dr. Hart has suggested by developing productive ways of intersecting business education with the liberal arts. At the same time, however, we should acknowledge some of the ways in which liberal arts institutions can learn a few things from professional schools about the importance of the application of knowledge. And we all may be in a position to appreciate some of the common challenges both types of institutions face in preparing students for life after college.
July 31, 2007 – Steven Weisler - Dean of Academic Development
An engineer's take Prof. Hart asserts that "[t]rying to make a business major 'more like the liberal arts' undermines the fundamental purposes of both". In my experience, trying to make an engineering major more like the liberal arts enhances professional outcomes while providing a focus for applying their liberal learning. Engineering is both a technical and a social discipline, and engineers need to understand how their work fits into human, historical, and cultural contexts. A curriculum that emphasizes only technologies and tools is unlikely to prepare them properly either for life or for work -- yet, a traditional liberal arts education is not a practical detour for the aspiring engineer, however enriching it might be. By emphasizing liberal outcomes such as inquiry and analysis, critical and creative thinking, written and oral communication, teamwork, and problem solving, we have found that our engineering students are far better prepared to practice the profession than if we limited their focus to the traditional engineering science content. By developing broad intellectual skills in the context of engineering problem solving, they come to understand that those skills can benefit their professional lives as well as their personal development.
August 2, 2007 – Rick Vaz - Dean, Interdisciplinary and Global Studies, WPI

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