Are Business Grads Hirable?

            First, a bit of background material:  Here in Iowa, as in most of the United States, public employees and public services are under attack by organized business interests and by their lackeys in government.  The scope of this attack is so broad as to include all forms of public services--even police and fire fighters.  But nowhere is this antisocial wrath focused more strongly than on public education. For the forces of “organized money,” the teachers’ union and the tenured professor are now the poster children for all that they see wrong with the world.

              Their enmity toward public education has many roots, not all of which are economic, and their desire to pay lower taxes may be but one part of a complex mosaic of motivational factors.  Educators, if they perform their function well, have a responsibility to disseminate the truth, including all those inconvenient truths which established interests would prefer to ignore or perhaps deliberately conceal.  And of course, there are cultural wars which can entrap educators no matter how strongly they attempt distance themselves from this kind of controversy.  Explaining to students how the photo decay of uranium inside a cubic zirconium crystal can tell us that the earth is about four and a half billion years old would not, to most of us,  seems like a very controversial thing to do. But to the sanctimonious lunatics who teach their children that God created the world in seven days, any teacher who would dare to say such things is clearly a servant of Satan. Yet it is the actual tax expenditure for education where these smoldering hostilities to the tellers of truth boil over into the political sphere and begin to have real world consequences.

             Education has always been expensive. But a generation ago, if anyone seriously suggested that it would be possible to maintain a modern, industrial state without continuing to make these expenditures, he would have been laughed out of any political party in the U.S. or any other Western country.  And till the end of the cold war, the most influential conservatives would still advocate increased educational expenditures--because education was one area where the Soviets were leaving us behind. But that was then, and this is now.

            The University of Northern Iowa has just suffered radical funding cuts, imposed by the GOP controlled state legislature.  About a third of all major programs have been discontinued, and the Malcolm Price Lab School, (at one time the premier pedagogical research facility in the country) will be closed. The faculty has returned to the administration a vote of no confidence, and the local debate is bitter and spirited.   As part of this ongoing debate, Jim Offner, the business columnist for the Waterloo Courier, wrote a March 25 column which said, basically, that while the goals of a well rounded education were valid goals, the employers’ demand for highly specialized workers makes the liberal arts degree impractical in today’s business environment. On April 1, a guest article, Liberal Arts Majors Are Very Hirable,  by Professor Martha Reineke of the UNI religion department and Professor Margaret Holland of the philosophy dept, appeared in the same paper in reply to Mr. Offner’s remarks. They offer evidence that if you look at mid-career salaries, liberal arts grads actually do much better in the job market than business grads.   They cite data from Pay Scale’s annual survey of salaries, which lists salaries of graduates according to major. This survey shows that at mid-career, philosophy majors have higher salaries than business management majors.  Reineke & Holland also show that liberal arts majors do better on all tests required for admission to advanced graduate programs, including law, management, and medicine. They wrote:

            “*Philosophy majors are No 1 on the LSAT; business majors are No 24.

            *Philosophy majors outperform business majors by a margin of 15% on the GMAT.

            *Philosophy majors, on average, do better than all other majors on the GRE, LSAT,             GMAT, and MCAT.”

Also, they quote the president of Babson College, (a business school) who claims that, due to the pace of change, business skills acquired in the classroom expire in about five years.  By contrast, he claims that skills learned in liberal arts disciplines such as history and philosophy are long lasting—and indispensable to business.  And they also quote Marissa Mayer, a Google vice president who studied philosophy and psychology at Stanford.  Mayer says that of the 6,000 people Google hires every year, 4,500 are liberal arts or humanities majors.

            (By the way, if you imagine that philosophy majors are students who spend most of their college years studying the writings of philosophers, or that they expect to be hired upon graduation to perform philosophy, let me correct your misimpression. The beauty of a philosophy major is that it is the one major which allows you to study almost any subject and still apply it towards your major.  Why?  Because almost any field of study can be considered a branch of philosophy.  Those who declare a philosophy major are simply those students who wish to acquire the broadest possible range of knowledge. )

            While Reineke and Holland did their homework well, and made a very convincing case for the continued value of the liberal arts, this is precisely what I would expect them to do, because their own department is one of those under assault. What did surprise me is that a few days later, I saw an article in the April 5 issue of the Wall Street Journal , Wealth or Waste?  Rethinking The Value of a Business Major, which said exactly the same thing. In fact, The WSJ piece makes the point even more strongly than Reineke & Holland do.  The article begins by saying:  “Undergraduate business majors are a dime a dozen on many college campuses.  But according to some, they may be worth even less.”            They say that more than 20% of U.S. undergraduates are business majors.  But faculty, school administrators, and corporate recruiters are beginning to question the value of a business degree at the undergraduate level.  The biggest complaint is that business majors focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and fail to develop the critical thinking and problem solving skills that are the hallmark of liberal arts courses.

            Top business schools are taking the hint.  The business schools at George Washington University, Georgetown University, and several others are now tweaking their undergraduate business curricula to integrate history, ethics, and writing--into courses about finance and marketing. At George Washington U., they are planning to use the expertise of their philosophy and psychology depts to teach business ethics.  And they plan to use the engineering dept to help teach sustainability. So, just as pro-business lackeys within the state legislature are trying to reduce or eliminate the liberal arts in favor of the study of business, (believing that this will be doing a favor to business interests) the top business schools and corporate recruiters are beginning to embrace the liberal arts as the only cure for what’s wrong with American business. Ahh, the irony of it all!  I will provide a link to both the Courier article and the WSJ piece, but you may hit a pay wall on WSJ.