The Homa Files

Punch line: The NY Times reports that b-school students are slackers … especially those specializing in management and marketing.

Ouch.

* * * * *

From the N.Y. Times …

The family of majors under the business umbrella — including finance, accounting, marketing, management and “general business” — accounts for just over 20 percent, or more than 325,000, of all bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in the United States, making it the most popular field of study.

But, all evidence suggests that student “disengagement” is at its worst in  business education.

Business majors spend less time preparing for class than do students in any other broad field: nearly half of seniors majoring in business say they spend fewer than 11 hours a week studying outside class.

Business majors have the weakest gains during the first two years of college on a national test of writing and reasoning skills. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than students in every other major.

You’ll hear pervasive anxiety about student apathy, especially in “soft” fields like management and marketing, which account for the majority of business majors.

Scholars in the field point to three sources of trouble.

First,  too many business students chose their majors “by default.”

“Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters.”

Second, in management and marketing, no strong consensus has emerged about what students ought to learn or how they ought to learn it.

Third, group assignments — a staple of management and marketing education —  are one of the elements of business that make it easy to skate through college.

A business professor at the University of Denver, studied group projects at his institution and found a perverse dynamic: the groups that functioned most smoothly were often the ones where the least learning occurred. That’s because students divided up the tasks in ways they felt comfortable with. The math whiz would do the statistical work, the English minor drafted the analysis. And then there’s the most common complaint about groups: some shoulder all the work, the rest do nothing.

Without some kind of hard constraint — like the licensure tests that accounting and finance students must face — courses inexorably become less rigorous.

Thanks to GB for feeding the lead.

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This entry was posted on April 25, 2011 at 6:27 am and is filed under Education - Academics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.