Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education E-Book

Anne Colby

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Serie: JB-Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 389

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Business is the largest undergraduate major in the United States and still growing. This reality, along with the immense power of the business sector and its significance for national and global well-being, makes quality education critical not only for the students themselves but also for the public good. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's national study of undergraduate business education found that most undergraduate programs are too narrow, failing to challenge students to question assumptions, think creatively, or understand the place of business in larger institutional contexts. Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education examines these limitations and describes the efforts of a diverse set of institutions to address them by integrating the best elements of liberal arts learning with business curriculum to help students develop wise, ethically grounded professional judgment.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

FOREWORD

Dedication

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE AUTHORS

1 LIBERAL LEARNING FOR BUSINESS EDUCATION

The Bell Project

Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education

The Design of the Study

Overview of the Book

A Teachable Moment

2 BUSINESS AND THE ACADEMY

Business Comes to the Academy

Trouble in the Academy

When the Market Is the Mind-Set

Business Today and Business Tomorrow

3 ON THE GROUND

Deep Dives but a Narrow Pool

Broadening the Frame: Business and Liberal Learning

The Business Student Experience

Preparation for Twenty-First-Century Business

Preparation for Twenty-First-Century Life

4 THE MEANING AND RELEVANCE OF LIBERAL EDUCATION

The Problem: Joining Liberal and Professional Education

Practical Reasoning

Integration in Action

Liberal Learning’s Three Modes of Thought

Opening Up Reflective Space

5 TEACHING FOR KEY DIMENSIONS OF LIBERAL LEARNING

Teaching for Analytical Thinking

Teaching for Multiple Framing

Teaching for the Reflective Exploration of Meaning

Teaching for Practical Reasoning

A Capstone Example

Meeting Multiple Challenges

6 PEDAGOGIES OF LIBERAL LEARNING IN BUSINESS EDUCATION

Teaching for Expertise

Teamwork

Supervised Practice

Case Studies

Simulations

Teaching Written and Oral Communication

7 STRUCTURAL APPROACHES TO INTEGRATION

Curricular Models and Approaches

Supporting an Integrative Curriculum

The Cocurriculum and the Campus Culture

8 EMERGING AGENDAS

Education for a Globally Connected World

Entrepreneurship and Innovation

Entrepreneurial Thinking as Liberal Learning

9 THE WAY FORWARD

The Need for Reform, Revisited

Five Recommendations

The Way Forward: An Action Agenda

REFERENCES

Index

Copyright © 2011 by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. 51 Vista Lane, Stanford, CA 94305. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rethinking undergraduate business education : liberal learning for the

profession / Anne Colby ... [et al.] ; foreword by Lee S. Shulman. -- 1st ed.

p. cm. -- (The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching ; 20)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

 ISBN 978-0-470-88962-6; 9781118038697 (ebk); 9781118038703 (ebk); 9781118038710 (ebk)

1. Business education. 2. Education, Humanistic. 3. Undergraduates. I.

Colby, Anne, date

 HF1106.R47 2011

 650.071'1--dc22

2011005922

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered in 1906 by an Act of Congress, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center whose charge is “to do and perform all things necessary to encourage, uphold, and dignify the profession of the teacher and the cause of higher education.”

The Foundation is a major national and international center for research and policy studies about teaching. Its mission is to address the hardest problems faced in teaching in public schools, colleges, and universities—that is, how to succeed in the classroom, how best to achieve lasting student learning, and how to assess the impact of teaching on students.

FOREWORD

IN HIS BOOK A Modern College and a Modern School, Abraham Flexner—famous for his pioneering Carnegie Foundation study of medical education—articulated his vision for the modern undergraduate institution. Published in 1923, Flexner argued that there were three kinds of students served by a modern college—future scholars, future professionals, and future businessmen and businesswomen. The first group comprised those few who intended to pursue graduate work as scholars, professors, or teachers in the fields that constituted the college curriculum. Professionals were those who were headed toward one of the learned professions such as medicine, law, engineering, and the like. Finally, those who were preparing for careers in business or commerce, the future merchants of our society, were in the third category. Thus preparation for business careers was identified nearly a century ago as one of the important missions of higher education.

Flexner was confident that education in the liberal arts and sciences was a necessity for a student in any one of those paths. He had, after all, been liberally educated at the Johns Hopkins University and then had returned to his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, to found and lead a very successful college preparatory school. For the future scholar, the importance of a broad background in the liberal arts was unquestioned in spite of the fact that he or she would ultimately specialize in a particular field from among those arts and sciences. For the future professional, the argument was somewhat more challenging, but one Flexner put forward with clarity and confidence for medicine and the other “learned professions.” But what of that third category, the substantial number of college graduates who intend to become members of the business community? Flexner made that argument for liberal learning with equal enthusiasm. He rested much of his case not merely on the general value of the skills, understandings, and values of the liberal arts for the decisions that characterize the world of business. He also asserted that, like all other educated men and women, future members of the business community also shared the responsibility of active citizenship in a democratic society, and preparation for that role was the most important function of liberal education.

At the Carnegie Foundation, we have not previously chosen to study education for business. Instead, we had examined those fields for which formal professional preparation in universities is a requirement for practice. This meant, however, that we had excluded from our work several forms of professional education that large numbers of students elect to study. Indeed, in recent years business has been the single most popular undergraduate major in the country. Moreover, the ordinary citizen interacts with businesswomen and businessmen far more frequently than with members of other professions.

We may seek medical care rarely, engage a lawyer even less often, and interact with a priest, minister, or rabbi on a weekly basis or not at all. But the world of commerce, of buying and selling, of banks and boutiques, of monthly salaries or foreclosed properties, is the sea in which we take our daily swim. And although one can engage in business without formal academic preparation (just as one can bandage a cut without nursing school and read a novel without becoming an English major), universities and colleges take very seriously their claim that they have the competence and responsibility to educate business practitioners. This book explores the grounds for that claim by seeking examples of the special contribution of higher education to the general intellectual and ethical preparation of business majors.

This book represents, in several ways, a convergence and culmination of more than a decade’s work at the Carnegie Foundation from the late 1990s to 2010. Several parallel programs of research were conducted during those years, independent from one another in one sense yet closely tied in another. One line was our work on education in the professions for which formal academic preparation is required. The professions that we studied are law, engineering, the clergy, nursing, and medicine. We also conducted parallel studies of teacher education, but not as part of the general and comparative Preparation for the Professions Program. This work was under the general coordination of William Sullivan and Anne Colby.

The second line of work was our studies of how colleges and universities prepare students for lives of civic engagement and political participation in a democratic society. This work was under the general direction of Anne Colby and Tom Ehrlich.

In addition, there were inquiries into challenges of integrated liberal learning for undergraduates. Mary Huber and Pat Hutchings led some of this work in collaboration with the Association of American Colleges and Universities. That line of inquiry was enriched by studies of “shaping the life of the mind for practice” in which William Sullivan and Matthew Rosin led a team exploring the integration of liberal and professional learning for undergraduates (Sullivan & Rosin, 2008).

These several lines of inquiry were elements of a larger examination (which included studies of the PhD across the disciplines) of how the educational process can prepare students “to profess,” to lead lives that require the exercise of intellect, skill, and moral intention for the sake of the greater society. Our method in each of these inquiries was to seek “visions of the possible” rather than primarily to offer criticisms of the offerings that were typical for a given field. Doing so involved identifying the consensus among leaders of the field regarding the most significant challenges that the profession was facing and those places where the most ambitious and creative attempts to deal with those challenges were in place or in development. Extended site visits to those institutions were typically complemented by survey research to tap a broader set of programs and perspectives, and small conferences to review and critique emerging work.

Thus, when our scholars ultimately proposed particular strategies of curriculum, teaching methods, field work, or program rearrangements, the teams could point to places that were already engaged with that kind of work rather than speculate about what that sort of innovation might look like, were someone to undertake it. Visions of the possible serve as existence proofs. They demonstrate that certain pedagogical initiatives can, in principle, be undertaken. Whether educators or policy makers are prepared to deploy the resources, the talent, and the will needed to move from examples to a broad shift in practice is another question.

A starting point for this book was asking the question, “What does it mean to think and live like an educated person?” The answer that is communicated early in this book and reappears regularly is that an educated person is capable of three interacting and complementary modes of thought: analytic reasoning, the ability and disposition to take multiple perspectives when confronting a complex decision or judgment, and finding and making connections of personal meaning between what one does and who one intends to become. Thus a good education prepares a student to dig deeply, critically, and analytically when confronted by a problem; to be able to see that same problem analytically from different points of view; and perhaps most important, to develop a sense of self and of personal identity in which these capacities and dispositions are well integrated. Relating the analytic and the multiple perspectives to the search for personal meaning, the elaboration of a sense of self, and the formation of identity appears to be the key. Ultimately, these liberal and professional capacities are not integrated in the way someone puts the pieces of a complex jigsaw puzzle together; they are integrated via the formation of a sense of identity and personal meaning so that these understandings and dispositions cohere.

As I have looked back on the many studies that my colleagues and I pursued during our work at the Carnegie Foundation, there is a consistent theme at that point in each inquiry when we move from description, diagnosis, and analysis to proposals for change and improvement. Again and again, I find that we recommend greater integration. It appears that the most common underlying malady besetting undergraduate education and doctoral education, the education of lawyers or of nurses, the preparation of teachers or of business leaders, is the disintegrated character of their learning experiences.

It should probably be no surprise that higher education breeds specialization, distinctiveness, and separation. The dominant social forces in universities are centrifugal, spinning the world apart into more discrete parts whose elucidation is the work of separate disciplines, fields, and professions. We recruit faculty members as experts in these areas, promote them because of their contributions to them, and organize both our catalogues and our libraries to correspond to their topography. The dilemma of universities in great measure is that when the educational goal is to teach students to become adept at practical reasoning in the presence of problems of the real world, the very separations that make the growth of knowledge possible make its educational use problematic. Disciplinary specialization is a powerful way to expand knowledge; it is a terrible way to apply it.

The core problem is not specialization and disciplinary investment per se. The problem is that the parts remain separate and distinct with no complementary strategy or incentive to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. I’m reminded of a conversation I had in the Moscow Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in 1980 with a Professor Posner. He observed, “You Americans fail to understand the important distinction between individualism and individuality as educational values. When a society values individualism, it rewards the development of personal expertise and talent so it can be used for the benefit and competitive advantage of the individual who possesses those attributes. By contrast, when a society values individuality, it too nurtures the development of individual talent and expertise, but rewards and recognition come when those accomplishments are then directed to the benefit of the larger community and not solely for the sake of the individual.” In universities, we readily reward the accomplishments of the individual academic entrepreneur but afford much less support to meeting the challenges of bringing those distinctive talents back together collaboratively for the sake of the institution’s educational and service efforts.

This book is filled with vivid accounts of teachers, courses, curricula, and student performances that transcend the centrifugal academic inertia in which curricular motion persists in spinning disciplinary concepts and their meanings further apart over time. These examples demonstrate that the problems can be addressed and we can cite powerful instances in all types of institutions. So why don’t these kinds of initiatives occur with regularity?

Such integrations require institutional intentionality, not parallel play. The integrations that are advocated can be achieved only when one or more faculty members are prepared to leave the comfort zones of their personal expertise and embark with their students into the messy domains of practice and practical reason. Moreover, they must be actively mixed together, squeezed and kneaded, shaken not stirred. This kind of integration does not occur by merely adding the humanities to a business curriculum as either prerequisite courses or distribution requirements. The reciprocal infusion of liberal learning and professional development is not like fluoridating the water to prevent cavities; liberal learning and business education do not affect one another by proximity. These educational ends will not be achieved by having business majors inhale the secondhand smoke of Plato and Emerson.

The strategic idea at the heart of the proposals for change is what I would describe as reciprocal integration. The authors are not just prescribing the value of the liberal arts to ameliorate the ills of business education in particular or professional and civic education more generally. This is a far more radical proposal. They assert that liberal education itself is also in distress, too often taught in isolation and antiseptically removed from the humans and their problems from which it purports to derive and to which it claims relevance. The concept of reciprocal integration argues strongly that the liberal arts must be professionalized, must be framed and taught in the context of practical problems, at least as much as practical learning needs to be enriched, nuanced, and critiqued through the lenses of the ideas and perspectives of the liberal arts. Each of these domains must serve as both crucible and catalyst to animate the educational potential of the other. Therein lies the most important challenge this book confronts in both of the academic domains that it studies. The concept of reciprocal integration demands intentionality and effort from all those who engage in undergraduate education.

This work was conducted by a “dream team” of Carnegie colleagues who joined together in this program of research. The team comprised Anne Colby, a developmental psychologist who has made singular contributions to our understanding of moral development across the life span; Tom Ehrlich, a lawyer who has served as professor, dean, provost, and president in private and public universities, and as a public servant at the national level, and whose liberal education probably owes at least as much to discussions at the Harkness tables of Exeter as to the lecture halls of Harvard; Bill Sullivan, a classically trained philosopher who has been doing as much social science as philosophy for the past twenty-five years; and Jon Dolle, an engineer turned educational philosopher and policy scholar, who joined the project as a graduate student and soon became a full partner (while earning a Stanford PhD). I tend to believe that this kind of interdisciplinary team could be formed “only at Carnegie” but that would be an exaggeration. It certainly was much easier to accomplish in a community of scholarship and policy that did not have to bear the burden of formal departments, academic disciplines, or an accounting of credit hours or even “Carnegie units.”

Would that our team could have come up with a simpler resolution than a call for the very sort of reciprocal integration of curriculum, of teaching and learning, and of institutional culture that our universities and colleges seem designed to resist. Alas, no quick fix presented itself. Teaching and learning are not activities for the faint of heart. Radical transformation of teaching and learning requires intelligence, tenacity, and courage. In that sense, the proposals that emerge from this work indeed echo the century of Carnegie work that began with Flexner’s studies of medical education. Acting on Mr. Flexner’s proposals produced a painful period of institutional dislocation and creative curricular destruction. And those changes eventually needed repair and renovation as well.

Our proposals to “fix” business education are also proposals to repair the deficiencies of general and liberal education even as the importance of such work becomes more apparent to our society and its leaders. Our proposals to repair the education of PhDs, reported in other books, are also critical here because we cannot ignore that doctoral education serves as the “normal school” for training future university and college faculty members, shaping their identities as it molds their habits of mind and their scholarly and teaching skills.

At the end of a dozen years of work, therefore, we present our colleagues in higher education with a daunting challenge. If you wish to make significant changes for the better in any particular domain of instruction—such as education for business—recognize that you must begin to mess with the entire interconnected and marbled enterprise. If nothing begins to unravel as you begin your work, it’s likely you have missed the point.

I know I join all who will read this book and ponder its implications for themselves and their institutions in thanking the authors for the rigor of their scholarship, the engaging clarity and stimulation of their accounts, and the inspiring character of their challenges. To read this book seriously does not engender a sense of comfort and satisfaction with the way things are; yet it does provide a thrilling vision of how they might be. And that has been the role of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching since that day in 1907 when the Foundation’s first president, Henry Pritchett, invited a schoolmaster named Abraham Flexner into his office and invited him to conduct a study of medical education.

Lee S. Shulman

Stanford, California

For the many Carnegie Foundation colleagues with whom we have worked and from whom we have learned—in incomparable intellectual community, with abundant hilarity and joy—from 1997 to 2010

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN RECOGNITION OF the collaborative nature of the research for and writing of this book, the three senior authors are listed alphabetically. Our coauthor, Jon Dolle, who was a doctoral student at Stanford during the research and writing, was also our full collaborator. The scheme for describing liberal learning in terms of Analytical Thinking, Multiple Framing, the Reflective Exploration of Meaning, and Practical Reasoning, which is introduced in Chapter Four, was developed by William Sullivan in the context of this project, drawing on his earlier work on Practical Reasoning (Sullivan & Rosin, 2008).

The team was assisted by many others, and we gratefully acknowledge the many people who have contributed to the project and the book. We especially want to acknowledge the help and hospitality extended by the administrative leadership, faculty, and students of the colleges and universities that participated in our study.

We are also indebted to the leadership and staff of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. President Lee S. Shulman provided ideal conditions for the cross-pollination of fields and ideas from which this project began. We are grateful to his successor, Tony Bryk, and Carnegie Foundation vice president John Ayers for continuing to provide a home for our work.

We wish to thank our reviewers, Sally Blount, Rakesh Khurana, and Jeff Nesteruk. Through their careful reading of the manuscript and constructive suggestions they enabled the authors to produce a much better book than they could otherwise have managed.

Former vice president of the Carnegie Foundation Patricia Hutchings provided incomparable editorial assistance in the preparation of the book. Her contributions made a huge difference in the cogency and readability of the manuscript.

The authors also owe a significant debt to those among their colleagues who took part in the site visits. Through their patient attention and careful observation, Tony Ciccone, Mary Huber, and Cheryl Richardson greatly enriched the authors’ understanding of the educational worlds they helped to explore.

We are also grateful to David Brightman, senior editor at Jossey-Bass, for his continuing support and encouragement.

Both the research and the book have been enhanced by the contributions of Jim Sirianni, then a Stanford doctoral student in education and research assistant to the project. Megan Downey and Dania Wright provided essential support that sustained the project and the writing of this book.

Finally, we wish to acknowledge the financial support of those who funded the project: Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Kauffman Foundation, the Skoll Foundation, and the Teagle Foundation. Without their confidence in the project, this book could not have been written.

THE AUTHORS

ANNE COLBY is a senior scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a consulting professor at Stanford University. Prior to joining the Carnegie Foundation in 1997, she was director of the Henry Murray Research Center at Harvard University. She is coauthor or editor of ten books, including The Measurement of Moral Judgment, Some Do Care: Contemporary Lives of Moral Commitment, Educating Citizens, and Educating Lawyers. A life-span developmental psychologist, Colby holds a BA in psychology from McGill University and a PhD in psychology from Columbia University.

JONATHAN R. DOLLE is an associate partner for Research and Development at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. From 2005 to 2010 he worked as a research assistant at the Foundation on the business education and liberal-learning project. He holds degrees in engineering, philosophy, and education policy from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In fall 2009 he was a Mirzayan Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Sciences. In 2010 he received his PhD in education from Stanford University and joined the Carnegie Foundation full time.

THOMAS EHRLICH is a visiting professor at the Stanford University School of Education. From 2000 to 2010 he was a senior scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. He has previously served as president of Indiana University, provost of the University of Pennsylvania, and dean of Stanford Law School. He was also the first president of the Legal Services Corporation in Washington, DC, and the first director of the International Development Cooperation Agency, reporting to then-president Carter. After his tenure at Indiana University, he was a Distinguished University Scholar at California State University and taught regularly at San Francisco State University. He is author, coauthor, or editor of thirteen books. He is a trustee of Mills College and has been a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania and Bennett College. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School and holds five honorary degrees.

WILLIAM M. SULLIVAN is a senior scholar at the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. He was formerly a senior scholar at The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching where he codirected the Preparation for the Professions Program. He is the author or coauthor of six books, including Educating Lawyers, Work and Integrity, A New Agenda for Higher Education, and Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Prior to working at the Carnegie Foundation, Sullivan was professor of philosophy at LaSalle University. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Fordham University.

1

LIBERAL LEARNING FOR BUSINESS EDUCATION

AN INTEGRATIVE VISION

BUSINESS HAS NEVER MATTERED MORE. Most people now realize that the livelihood of citizens of Minneapolis is related in complicated ways to the skills and aspirations of the citizens of Guangzhou, Sao Paolo, and Mumbai as well as those of Mobile. The enormous economic expansion within some of the most populous nations of the world, especially China, Brazil, and India, has put competitive pressure on growing numbers of U.S. workers and firms, who compete with others in distant places, even as they also sometimes cooperate through complex networks of trade and investment.

Increasingly, this fragile interdependence is being managed by international business and, over the past several decades especially, by banking and financial sectors that have become tightly linked on a global scale. The “commanding heights” of the economic welfare of nations are no longer occupied by governments alone (Yergin & Stanislaw, 1998). Business in its multiple manifestations has become a prodigious governing force, shaping the destiny of people everywhere.

Business is also more important than ever in American higher education. In 2006–07, the most recent academic year for which national data were available, 21 percent of all undergraduates were business majors. This makes business the most popular field of undergraduate study. When business is combined with other vocational majors such as engineering, nursing, education, agriculture, security studies, and others, the total rises to 68 percent of all undergraduates (National Center for Educational Statistics, 2009).

At the same time, the prominence of business institutions in contemporary U.S. society has enhanced the prestige and authority of successful leaders in business, and business ways of thinking have now taken hold in wider sectors, including not only government but also the organization and leadership of the academy.

For higher education, these developments pose an important question. The American academy has been chartered for important public purposes, chiefly to educate citizens for democracy. The centrality of business in society, the great number of undergraduates who choose business as their field of study, and the even greater numbers who will be employed in business for their working lives demand that higher education do more than just help students acquire tools for advancing their personal careers in business, although that is an important goal. In order to ensure that its graduates develop the breadth of outlook and conceptual agility for living in a global century, higher education also needs to ensure that students understand the relation of business to the larger world and can act on that understanding as business professionals and as citizens. The question, then, is how best to do this? What should undergraduate business education provide for students?

The Bell Project

The answers proposed in this book reflect our work in the Business, Entrepreneurship, and Liberal Learning (BELL) project, an initiative of The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Simply put, we believe that undergraduate students who major in business should have the benefits of a strong liberal education. Business and liberal learning must be woven together to prepare students for their professional roles and work and also to prepare them for lives of social contribution and personal fulfillment. In this sense, we propose an integrative vision.

Accordingly, our research has focused on how liberal education interacts with business preparation in undergraduate programs, asking how well undergraduate business education has been able to take advantage of the contributions of liberal learning. We began our research with an understanding, which was subsequently reinforced by our observations, that business majors typically experience the liberal arts and sciences in ways that are weak or episodic. Many business students see liberal arts courses as largely irrelevant to their education. For all the reasons discussed previously—and elaborated in the pages that follow—we believe this is unsatisfactory. Therefore, we set out to examine programs that explicitly announced the intent to provide their undergraduate business majors with the benefits of liberal learning, looking both at common principles and concepts shaping their efforts and at the diverse strategies they have employed. These institutions’ efforts hold lessons for one another and for the larger field of business education, and we believe they also provide an opportunity for liberal arts disciplines to learn from business education, especially about strategies that help students practice and refine their knowledge in real-world circumstances (see, for instance, Shulman, 1997). Additionally, successful efforts at integration within business programs may be instructive for other professional and vocational programs that wish to do the same.

In this sense, we view business education as an instance of the larger phenomenon of vocational majors, fields of study that aim to prepare students directly for entry into the workforce. Due to the rising costs of higher education and the challenges of the employment market, students and their parents today consider preparation for work a top priority among the goals of higher education, and this preference is reflected in the large percentage of students choosing to major in professional or vocational fields. Because more undergraduate students major in business than in any other single field, it would seem there might be a distinctive character or identity to studying business at the college level. But we did not find this to be the case. Undergraduate business seems to be widely understood as a kind of simplified MBA program. In institutions that offer both MBA and undergraduate business degrees, the undergraduate program rarely has its own faculty or dean and its curriculum resembles that of the graduate program. A more distinctive identity for undergraduate business programs would acknowledge that this is their students’ college education as well as professional preparation. This means, in the American tradition of liberal education, that students need to be prepared for their futures as citizens and persons as well as entrants into the workforce.

Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education

To meet the needs of today’s increasingly complex context, undergraduate business programs should help their students develop intellectual perspectives that enable them to understand the role of the field within the larger social world. In keeping with this aim, business programs should uphold and cultivate among students a sense of professionalism grounded in loyalty to the mission of business to enhance public prosperity and well-being. To accomplish this, business education must be integrated with liberal learning.

We believe that undergraduate education of every kind should enable students to make sense of the world and their place in it, preparing them to use knowledge and skills as means toward responsible engagement with the world. In order to contribute to the larger life of society, students must be able to draw on varied bodies of knowledge. They need to gain fluency in looking at issues from multiple points of view, which requires the opportunity to explore with others different ways of posing problems and defining purposes. These are the traits that have historically defined a liberal education. In this sense, the question of what business education should provide for students is part of the more fundamental question of what a college education should provide.

Research on educational attainment provides abundant evidence that a college education produces significant lifelong effects. College is a prime moment for students, including many older students, to question and redefine their core sense of who they are. It offers the opportunity to expand their understanding of the world and to develop skills they will need to make their way in it. College education enables students to grow as whole persons as well as develop their minds and strengthen their working skills. It helps awaken their intellectual curiosity and self-reflection and can aid their evolution toward attaining a sense of responsibility for the common good.

Today’s educational challenge is to prepare students for a world in which ensuring the welfare of the human population must take place within a concern for planetary survival. In such a context, a college education needs more than ever to enable students to understand the world and find their place in it. Beyond that, higher education’s mission requires helping students develop so they can and will contribute to the life of their times. These are ideals long espoused by the tradition of liberal education and represented in the core commitments that define professional preparation. These aims have become especially important in the education of business undergraduates today because of the critical and pervasive role of business in contemporary life.

Narrowed Perspectives and Missed Connections

Business programs, like all forms of professional preparation, immerse students in the values and mind-sets that are peculiar to the field; in business this means, most prominently, the logic of the marketplace. This immersion holds the attendant danger that students will lose sight of the larger pluralism of institutional sectors and spheres of value within which business has to operate. This is not just a theoretical concern. Indeed, we found it distressingly common, even in high-quality programs, to hear students say that their business courses had taught them that “everything is business”—overlooking the different values represented by their families, religious congregations, and communities.

Like all undergraduates, business students need the ability to grasp the pluralism in ways of thinking and acting that is so salient a characteristic of the contemporary world. And it is especially important that business students learn to recognize and distinguish between the dominant logic of business and the marketplace, on the one hand, and, on the other, the very different values and ways of acting that hold sway in the family and the domestic sphere, the worlds of science and education, the arts, and within a democratic government. Business graduates will need facility in moving among these different spheres of value and logics of action. They will benefit from learning to see business and its logic from the outside as well as from within.

The need to grasp this pluralism of values and contexts is, we believe, a weak link in the current organization of undergraduate business programs. Most business programs require their students to take a substantial number of courses outside the business disciplines, in classic arts and sciences fields such as English composition, literature, history, the social sciences, science, and mathematics. However, the relation of these studies to students’ major courses in business is rarely well articulated or closely coordinated. The overall program as it stands now might be thought of as a curricular barbell: each end of the bar carries a significant weight of intellectual subject matter but the connection is slender. On the two ends of the barbell, students encounter courses taught by different groups of faculty, often from different schools or colleges, who have little contact with their colleagues on the other side of the curriculum. The linkages between the two ends of the barbell receive little explicit attention either in the way the curriculum is organized or in how courses are taught.

This arrangement is not the best way to support the high-quality, interconnected learning that today’s students need in order to understand the relation of business to the larger world. In recent decades, research on human learning has made it clear that effective learning depends significantly on learners’ intentions and motivation. With business students’ focus on career preparation as the most important outcome of college, the goals of liberal education are more achievable if they are explicitly related to students’ existing horizon of interest.

Liberal learning has the potential to broaden and reshape such initially narrow purposes but for this to occur students must come to see how and why the perspectives of the arts and sciences disciplines open up and provide insight into matters of concern to them. This requires a kind of teaching that systematically leads students to grasp and participate in making such connections (Kuh, 2008; National Research Council, 2000; Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005).

An Integrative Vision

Our aim in this book is to stimulate and contribute to a national discussion about business education and its future by focusing on approaches that work to integrate the two ends of the usual barbell curriculum. Rather than a barbell, we envision something more like a double helix. Borrowing from the famous DNA model developed by Watson and Crick, we propose the double helix as a metaphor for an undergraduate business curriculum that explicitly and continually links students’ learning of business to their use of various arts and sciences disciplines that provide a larger, complementary view of the world.

This is not simply an imagined possibility. As we will illustrate in the chapters that follow, we observed courses and entire programs that explicitly put the disciplinary insights and tools of the social sciences and humanities to use in this way. We first encountered the double helix metaphor at Santa Clara University. There, and in similar programs, we saw the liberal arts and sciences used to provide an understanding of the other institutional sectors that business depends on, such as effective public education systems organized by governments, and the ways in which business affects those other institutional contexts. Through these double helix approaches, faculty as well as students can develop facility in navigating the pluralism of values and operating logics that will mark their graduates’ actual lives as business professionals and as citizens.

In the absence of this kind of integrative consciousness, undergraduate business education is often narrow. By this we mean that it provides too little depth of understanding about or flexibility of perspective on the tools and concepts employed in business disciplines. This leads students to view these conceptual tools not as hypotheses to be employed for specific purposes but as simple and complete descriptions of reality. As we will try to show, this limits students’ development as thinkers. And, in doing so, it threatens to undermine the creative thinking that feeds innovation.

By contrast, when there is more intentional integration of liberal learning approaches with business—double helix style—faculty can help students achieve more advanced educational goals. They can also strengthen students’ sense of professional purpose by showing more effectively how business is interconnected with other dimensions of society and the environment. Implementing this integrative approach will require significant and sometimes difficult reform—that is the nature of innovation. But there is much to build on, historically and in current campus practice.

The Design of the Study

We began our study by surveying business programs broadly, by reading widely in the history of the field and in current business education literature, and by talking with those who have special expertise and experience to share. We also brought to our work a set of ideas and frameworks from Carnegie’s earlier studies of preparation in nursing, medicine, the clergy, engineering, and law (Benner, Sutphen, Leonard, & Day, 2009; Cooke, Irby, & O’Brien, 2010; Foster, Dahill, Golemon, & Tolentino, 2006; Sheppard, Macatangay, Colby, & Sullivan, 2009; Sullivan, Colby, Wegner, Bond, & Shulman, 2007).

With a broad sense of the field in view, we chose ten campuses for intensive site visits during the academic years 2007–08 and 2008–09. Our first criterion was to look for places that were committed to bringing liberal learning and business perspectives together in an intentionally integrated curriculum with appropriate pedagogies.

To ensure that we grasped the broad range of issues involved, we also wanted to be sure we visited a variety of program types. We went to several large university business schools. One of these was the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University (IU), as well as the Liberal Arts and Management Program housed in the IU College of Arts and Sciences. Three private university business schools figured in our rounds: the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the Stern School of New York University along with the Program in Management Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management. We visited Babson College and Bentley University, institutions begun as business colleges that have evolved into full four-year institutions, as well as Morehouse College and Franklin & Marshall College among predominately liberal arts institutions. Our sites also included Santa Clara University, a Jesuit institution in California, and Portland State University, a public, urban university in Oregon (see ‘‘Site Visit Institutions’’).

Site Visit Institutions

Babson College

Bentley University

Franklin & Marshall College

Indiana University, Bloomington (Kelley)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Sloan)

Morehouse College

New York University (Stern)

Portland State University

Santa Clara University (Leavey)

University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)

Our campus visits lasted several days. During that time, we spoke with a variety of academic personnel and students. We talked with deans, faculty, and students in the business programs and the arts and sciences. We visited classes in the business disciplines and the arts and sciences courses frequented by business students, giving special attention to those educational experiences that brought the two areas of the curriculum together. We sought to understand the varying practices of teaching and learning employed in these areas of the business students’ curriculum, the kinds of intellectual and social skills that each emphasizes, how students are assessed, and the kinds of moral meaning and professional identity that faculty intend to convey and that students perceive as salient. We interviewed arts and sciences and business faculty individually and held focus groups with students from business and the arts and sciences.

Our aim in these conversations was to understand the experience of business education for faculty and for students and how that is enriched or modified by experiences with liberal learning methods and content. To round out our picture, we also inquired into cocurricular activities and the overall campus climate. We spoke with student affairs personnel and student advisors as well as recent graduates of several of the programs we visited. From these conversations, we assembled detailed pictures of how specific practices of business education focus students’ understanding and sensibility and the ways in which integration with the perspectives of the liberal arts and sciences expands and enriches such understanding and opens possibilities for students. These observations and conversations form the basis of the argument this book sets out in the following chapters.

Overview of the Book

Building on the themes and rationale articulated in these opening pages, Chapter Two sets our study and recommendations in a longer-term context. Toward this end, we review a century of developments in which business education has been reshaped several times in response to the needs and problems of business and the larger society. Indeed, many of the issues in the field’s historical development continue to be salient today; in some ways they are the source of today’s challenges but they are also, in some cases, windows into what will be needed to meet those challenges.

Chapter Three turns to the experience of today’s undergraduate business students. We draw here not only on our conversations and observations at particular institutions but also on what is known through research and practice about the larger world of undergraduate business programs. Our findings point to the strengths of business programs—particularly their attention to students’ application and use of knowledge in real-world contexts—and to limitations that call out for a more robust dose of knowledge, skills, and ways of thinking from the liberal arts and sciences. Our sense of these strengths and limitations reflects what we learned about the goals and attitudes of students in business and the arts and sciences as well.

Chapter Four sets out a normative model of liberal education, its goals, and its distinctive modes of thinking, which we identify as Analytical Thinking, Multiple Framing, and the Reflective Exploration of Meaning. Our aim is to show what these three modes entail and to illustrate how they complement and can be enriched by the forms of Practical Reasoning characteristic of professional education. This chapter also compares undergraduate business with other forms of professional preparation.

Chapter Five describes some of the ways that the dimensions of liberal learning described in Chapter Four are taught in the courses we observed and examines their relative prevalence in different areas of the curriculum and the experience of students. We want to provide concrete instances of how these learning goals are addressed by faculty in business and in the liberal arts and to give the reader a sense of which goals are well represented, which warrant increased attention, and what can be learned from practices now in place on campuses we visited.

Chapter Six focuses on pedagogical strategies that support the integration of liberal and business learning. We highlight a set of powerful pedagogies that are especially characteristic of undergraduate business education but we also look at some that are important but not widely experienced by business students. The chapter suggests that arts and sciences faculty have much to learn pedagogically from their colleagues in business schools, just as business faculty can benefit from teaching approaches more characteristic of the liberal arts.