Business Majors At Top Undergrad B-Schools

HISTORICAL REASONS FOR JUST ONE MAJOR

If Kelley is at one extreme, the Kenan-Flagler Business School is at the other. In UNC’s undergraduate business program, having just one major is a matter of tradition.

“When they started the business school many years ago, I think the underlying premise was that we wanted students to have a great liberal arts education, and we didn’t want the business school classes taking that opportunity away,” says Professor Dick Blackburn, associate dean of the undergraduate business program.

Blackburn says they’ve had a ‘general management perspective’ for years, based on the idea that most of the companies that recruit Kenan-Flagler graduates have company-specific systems or styles, which business majors can easily learn on the job.

STUDENTS DON’T ALWAYS KNOW WHAT THEY WANT

But they’re certainly open to change. A while back, Blackburn says several recruiters mentioned that they would appreciate it if Kenan-Flagler graduates had a bit more specialization, and so the school began offering “Areas of Emphasis.”

“We have 11 or 12 now, so if they want to pursue areas like finance, or marketing, they can take electives in that,” Blackburn says. “They can’t take more than three or four electives in one subject, because we don’t want them to spend too much time in one area. They can take two areas of emphasis, but it wouldn’t be like they spent their whole college education taking nothing but marketing or finance.”

This is because Kenan-Flagler doesn’t want students getting locked into a particular branch of business too early. “It’s not clear that students always know what they want to do,” Blackburn says. “If they lock themselves into one major, and they realize later that they don’t like it, but they still need a major to graduate, they’re stuck.”

For the most part, he says they haven’t found that the market is saying they should specialize any more than they are. “It’s worked for us, I don’t think we’ve heard from either side – students, parents, or recruiters – that we need to do majors,” Blackburn says. “That’s not say we won’t do it in the future.”

ONE MAJOR MEANS FEWER BARRIERS

Michigan’s Ross School of Business also has just one business major, and BBA director of admissions Paul Kirsch believes that a general management degree provides the most opportunities for students to explore the breadth of business education.

“From a student perspective, there’s no secondary hurdle to get into your major. Some programs, you might have to get into the business schools, and then you might need a certain GPA to get into a certain major,” Kirsch says. “So this way, we allow our students to take courses in whatever subjects they want to.”

On top of that, he says that while majors can offer specificity, they can also be limiting. At Ross, students can customize their own degree, through core classes, electives, and unofficial concentrations, in ways that traditional majors might now allow. In fact, he says that while Ross doesn’t have an official count, he believes that the majority of the school’s students do identify concentrations on their resumes.

“The other huge benefit is that all of our students can interview with any of the recruiters that come to campus, and they can put together a resume and value statement that makes them applicable to a great variety of positions,” he says. “At schools with majors, it may be hard for someone with a finance major to interview for a marketing job. We don’t have those barriers.”

Kirsch says they’ve never seriously considered dividing the school into majors, but that they’re always in a state of renewal, and they’re always adding new electives, so students and faculty have the options they want.

To see which majors the top 25 undergraduate business schools offer, check out the chart on the next page.