Students from Pace’s Lubin School of Business headed to their graduation.
Pace University
We hear it everywhere: More and more, students and their parents are demanding the science, tech, engineering and math classes that they see—correctly—as key to successful, financially secure futures.
But it’s also true that business remains the most popular undergraduate major, by far. Some 367,000 bachelor’s degrees for business majors were awarded in the 2016-2017 academic year, the most recent for which the National Center for Education Statistics has published data.
And that’s because a business education still has tremendous value, more than ever in a STEM world.
That fact doesn’t always make the headlines. Just this month, The Wall Street Journal reported on a trend of universities that are shutting down their M.B.A. programs. There were 9% fewer full-time, two-year M.B.A. programs in 2018 than there were in 2014, the newspaper reported, citing data from the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business.
And that’s driven by a decline in M.B.A. admissions reported last fall. According to data released then by the Graduate Management Admissions Council, applications for M.B.A. programs dropped 6.6% last year, the fourth year of decline—with a 70% of full-time M.B.A. programs seeing fewer applications than the year prior.
But that doesn’t mean it’s time to end business education. Instead, we need to reconfigure how we deliver it on the graduate level, and we need to make clear its value for undergraduates. And that’s exactly what colleges and universities are doing.
Graduate students have different needs today than they did in decades or even a few years ago. That’s why there’s the decrease in demand for an M.B.A. Instead, today’s students want—and universities are delivering—shorter, flexible, and specialized programs. They’re returning to business school later in life to earn new credentials that will help them navigate an ever-changing, and ever-faster-changing, world of employment. That’s also why a full-time, two-year commitment is no longer viable for many of them, and why universities are increasingly offering graduate business education in online and hybrid programs.
The same AACSB data the Journal cited also showed 140 new master’s programs in specialized business subjects, like data analytics, since 2014. That’s a 16% increase. And online M.B.A. programs have doubled since 2014, the AACSB data show.
At the same time, even as we are correctly teaching our students the STEM skills they’ll need to succeed in an increasingly tech-reliant future, business skills continue to matter, too. We need to make that clearer.
As Neil Braun, the dean of the Lubin School of Business here at Pace, often says, every successful business—every startup, every tech disrupter—needs to be financed, marketed, accounted, and managed. Even the greatest new idea can only become a viable, successful business with the help of people who know how to define a need, develop a plan, create a budget, raise financing, hire the right employees, create the right marketing messages, and define metrics to measure progress.
That’s what a business education teaches.
More than that, and especially at an undergraduate level, we know that some of the most important things students learn in college are not discipline-specific. Employers, business leaders, and alumni mentors all tell us the same thing: They’re looking for college graduates who know how to think, how to learn, and how to communicate. They need flexible thinkers who can problem solve across disciplines and continuously learn new skills. I was at a roundtable of business leaders in Westchester County, New York, and those gathered executives spoke with one voice: They need graduates who have technical skills, and they really need graduates who also have the so-called soft skills, like critical thinking and interpersonal communications.
That’s also borne out by data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, in which surveyed businesses ranked leadership skills, teamwork, communication skills and problem-solving skills as the attributes they most seek in employment candidates, above analytical and quantitative skills, technical skills and computer skills.
And that’s the beauty of a business education. Students across fields and majors learn critical thinking and problem solving. But in a business education, a student learns those skills in a context of commerce and industry, learns them in a way that will be instantly useful in the workplace. Simply put, business education teaches students not just the fundamentals of business but also the ways of thinking and interacting that are critical in the business world.
How we deliver that education, and how it is applied, may change, but it will remain deeply valuable.
