By Carly Vendegna
BusinessWeek's 2007 list of the best undergraduate business schools ranked the Robins School of Business number 23. A school that gets an A+ in teaching quality and A's in facilities, services and job placement on the list is bound to attract students.
But the wide attention and increasing number of business majors has no doubt posed for some the question: Are students going for the right reasons? Moreover, how do you know what the right reason is?
"Personally I am always skeptical as to whether they choose that for themselves," said Melanie Martin, a sophomore psychology major. "I wonder if their parents choose that for them or if they have the idea that B-school is the best way to make a lot of money. It worries me because I wonder if those students are really happy."
On this campus, it appears there is a general consensus about who will make more money and who will not easily find a job. In interviews with students in finance, accounting, environmental studies, marketing, biology, international studies, political science, Spanish and other majors, when asked about their study focus, this is what they said:
Business school students:
€¢ Will have better presentation, networking, group work skills
€¢ Will not have an open enough mind when approaching the world
€¢ Can get right out into the workforce and earn a competitive salary as opposed to having to continue education "to land a decent job"
€¢ Are trained in the real world
€¢ Are provided with a more focused life plan than A&S students
Arts and Sciences students:
€¢ Will have better written and communication skills
€¢ Their major will be more versatile and help land more kinds of jobs
How valid are these statements? How valid is, "do what you love and the rest will follow?" Who do you listen to when you decide your major, and how much is today's student affected by societal pressures.
What Gets You Hired
"Everything is business," said Lin Koch, the resource and operations manager for the Career Development Center. "Success is all about how you market skills you gained from your major."
Liberal arts majors have just as much potential after graduation, she said, and students need to understand that a degree in business will not always equal instant gratification after graduation.
Koch has worked in the career center since 1995 and is responsible for all marketing and communications, supervision of the administrative assistant and project team and manages the center's library and web resources. She urged students to look at the resources made available to them at the center, including the lists of traits employers seek.
The National Association of Colleges and Employers is a source of information on employment that is available at the center. NACE connects more than 5,200 college career services professionals at nearly 2,000 college and universities nationwide, with surveys on salary, the job market and conducts research on topics such as "The Perfect Candidate."
The NACE Research job outlook for 2008 had employers rate the importance of candidate qualities and skills. Communication skills topped the list, followed by strong work ethic, teamwork skills, initiative, interpersonal skills, problem-solving skills, analytical skills and flexibility.
Cory Cuje, a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, said employers seek exactly what the NACE found in candidates.
"Communication skills, personality and professionalism," he said. "That’s what they are ultimately hired on.
"You can graduate at the top of your class in the business school, but if you can’t communicate with an interviewer, you’re not going to get a job."
Joe Testani, the associate director of the career center and liaison to the business school, said written and oral communication is key. "The growing proliferation of people working in teams, internationalization and online technology are fast becoming key components to workplaces to matter what industry," he said.
In the book, "Liberal Education and the Corporation: The Hiring and Advancement of College Graduates," Michel Useem surveyed 535 major business corporations and 505 middle and senior managers of large American corporation. He concluded that the most attractive qualities to employers of liberal arts graduates were their communication skills, ability to understand people, appreciation of ethical issues, and leadership skills.
Why should you do what you love?
A big part of the hiring process for graduates who are immediately entering the workforce is the ability to show passion in a job interview, said Katybeth Dreisbach, assistant director of the career center.
"The process of finding a job is kind of like dating," she said. "You don't want someone to walk up to you and say: €˜I need a date. Do you want to go out with me?' That's lame! Of course you don't!
"You want them to think you are amazing. €˜Let me tell you what I admire about you.' And that's what an interview should be like. €˜Wow, I see what you guys are doing and that's so awesome! That's so in line with this passion that I've found.'"
Psychology professor David Leary , dean of arts and sciences from 1989 to 1992, begs students to ask themselves, "What are you interested in? Whose life are you living? What is it that you want to do?" he said. "Pursue it, you'll be good at it."
In a July 2001 article of USA Today titled "Offbeat majors help CEOs think outside the box," author Del Jones wrote about CEOs' undergraduate degrees. He noted that Disney CEO Michael Eisner was an English and theater major and St. Supery winery's CEO Michaela Rodeno majored in French literature.
"Ambitious college grads peddling offbeat degrees in a job market gone sour can take heart that such success stories are far from rare," Jones wrote.
Economics professor David Dean believes that if you pick a versatile major, you may have to do a bit more work to get hired. "You go out and you look for econ jobs in the wanted ads, and it goes from DRIVERS to EDITORS, there's never anything that says economics," he said "But what employers like about economics is the way you've been trained to think about things.
"And that's true across a lot of different jobs. Economics majors get employed in a lot of different areas that b-school students, who are very narrowly focused, would not have a chance."
Become passionate, responsibly
Although the business school was ranked 23rd, the statistics have to be kept in reality, Leary suggests. There are only about 100 undergraduate business schools while the university was ranked 40 out of more than 3,000 liberal arts colleges in the country.
Leary said students now pick business majors at the request of their parents and have a skewed perception of what the rankings mean. This ranking has created an influx of students flocking to the business school who should not even be there, he said.
"Sometimes I feel as if some of the students are in the b-school just because they haven’t found a particular interest in anything else," said junior Lauren Pryor, a business administration major with concentrations in finance and accounting.
"Go if you're passionate about it." Leary said, "Don't go because you want to be in business and you think you've got to do it.
"It's pretty good if you realize that you're not excited yet. You should know the difference between being excited and not excited. And if you're not, you should keep looking." About 65 per cent of students change their majors, he said that is the benefit of a liberal arts education: There are other places to move to.
Testani reinforced the importance of passion in a career. "Overriding characteristics that match CEOs across the board is their passion for what they do," he said. "It's not that they all have finance degrees. It's that they're passionate about what they do, no matter what company or CEO, they just love working in the industry that they work in."
Accounting professor Joe Hoyle said, "The purpose of an education is to form a foundation to help you have a satisfying, well-developed life. At the same time though, you need to be able to go out and support yourself."
Hoyle said that it was vital students to be able to morph their major and passions into being a 28-, 30- and 32-year-old person. "Someday your children will need braces," he said, and you will realize how important it is to give children what they need or want. He wants to see more liberal arts majors attuned to that, he said.
Testani said the career center challenged students to ask the question, "Why?" in regards to their career path decisions. He understands that it is hard to follow your passion when you have a mortgage and three kids. The role of the career center, he said, is to prepare you to ask the right questions, as you get older. There is a large correlation between fulfillment and success, he said.
Why should you challenge yourself?
Hoyle wrote in his essay "Tips and Thoughts on Improving the Teaching Process in College," for most students this is their one chance at college. "They deserve nothing less than an excellent education, moreover, an academic experience that challenges them to excel from their first day to their last."
Leary, the coordinator of the freshmen Core program, hears many complaints from students that their professor is harder than other professors.
Students say to me, "Grading hard is unfair and I say, not at all," he said. "Grading easy is unfair to the good student knowing that 10 other students are getting the same grade for not doing very good work. Who's not being fair? It's the faculty member who's not demanding enough or holding you to high standards."
Leary tells his freshmen, "Send that student to me and I'll put them in a more challenging section."
He wonders how much a parent's influence of constant admiration and pride has influenced how students see grades. "A grade is not a comment about your character," he said. "People don't keep things in a bigger perspective. Maybe we don't do a good job telling you."
What's the best way to leave Richmond? Should you graduate with a high GPA, a job lined up right away or a sense that you learned a lot, had great professors that taught you how to challenge yourself? How overstated is that?
Dean, also known as "Dr. Death" in the business school for his daily quizzes and challenging tests, says he sees two kinds of students. There are some in his class for grade maximization and others who want to learn the material, he said. "My personal preference is that you go out and you learn," he said. "You get a benefit just from learning. Who cares about whether it's going to translate into the job market or not?"
Dean, a liberal arts major himself, values the concept of learning and would not sacrifice it even if it does not immediately translate into a job, he said.
Hoyle pushes students to take teachers and not classes. He believes that this would change everyone's college experience dramatically.
When you get out of school and when people ask you what you liked about Richmond," he said, "you'll never say, €˜I liked a particular course.' No, you'll say, €˜I had two or three teachers that were just so influential on me.'"
Hoyle teaches students more than just accounting material in the hopes that his students find a passion in life. He encourages students to see plays, ballets and read good books, he said, because college is the time to get introduced to new material.
"I like to think that in my classes, we're not just teaching accounting," he said. "We're teaching — you know you got 60 more years to live let's make the best of it — type of thing. To have a passion in your life is the absolutely best thing that you can have."
Millennial Expectations and Ambiguity
Leary has noticed that in the past 15 years, the number of students whose interest in self-discovery has changed dramatically. "People are not coming to college to think about themselves," he said. "They want to make money. A lot of people say, €˜I want to make money, a lot of money.'"
Dreisbach said there was a real adversity to risk across the board. Millennials have grown up very structured and always had something to be at a time they had to be there and were carted by their parents, she said. "Up until now, you've had this equation for a successful life," she said. "The really tricky part is there isn't really an equation after graduation and that freaks people out."
Millennials is the term for the generation that has come to age at the time of the year 2000 born between 1981 and 1999, said Lynne C. Lancaster and David Stillman, authors of the book, "When Generations Collide."
"Because they've worked the worker shortage by Gen Xers (born between 1965-1980), they've never had to search very hard to find jobs," said the authors. "And because the economy has been so strong as they've come of age, Millennials have had the luxury of working when they need to and not working when they don't."
Anyone today can see the relevance of that statement in young adults. College students are raised in an incredibly consumer-driven society.
The Millennials are some of the most career-orientated people and they all want to know "what" they are going to do with their major, said Dreisbach, who never asked that while in college.
What has sparked this career-orientated drive in students today?
Dean believes the baby-boomers see their children's success as ways to compete with each other.
Since you have had everything structured out, Testani said, when graduation comes and suddenly life become nebulous and grey, students perceive that first job as a security blanket. It is often the logical progression of an education, he said.
The harm in entering college with a career-orientated focus makes a student more vulnerable to trouble in dealing with an ambiguous world, said both Dreisbach and Testani.
"The b-school is more formulaic, Dreisbach said, "which is why it attracts this generation." Students can see where they are going with that, she said.
"Arts and sciences is more ambiguous, but honestly a lot of employers think that's a plus," she said. "The work world is ambiguous and you have to learn to deal with ambiguity."
The loss of individuality and the prominence of group think in this generation is dangerous, Testani said. He agreed that this trend could be a reason students uninterested in business are flocking to the business school.
Testani reminds those in higher education to look where the innovation in the world is originating. He said that it is not from the United States and that should concern educators and students. "When you lose that individuality," he said, "you lose the leadership and the creativity that's innovative in business.
"The better you're able to deal with that ambiguity and prepare yourself from experiences, I think that prepares you for whatever job you go into."
Millennials: Generation We, Generation Quiet?
Numerous studies, books, surveys and centers have appeared over the past few years in order to observe and make predication about how this generation will fare in the workforce and society in the coming decades. Of course, sweeping generalizations are impossible but trends are easily seen from generation to generation regarding work ethics, spending habits and leisure.
"I see the TV program €˜Friends' as a model your generation grew up with," Leary said, "very loyal to each other to a fault."
He sees bright students in his classroom that have things to say but there is a hesitancy at not to stand out. "On the one hand, you have people who really want to achieve and get rich, "he said. "But on the other hand, they don't want to do it in a way that offends anybody."
Thomas Friedman wrote in an October 2007 opinion piece in the New York Times, that even tough students study and volunteer abroad and show concern for world problems, he is surprised at the lack of their engagement in real politics.
"I am impressed because they are so much more optimistic and idealistic than they should be," he said. "I am baffled because they are so much less radical and politically engaged than they need to be."
Friedman continued: "Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms. Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual."
So how can a generation be so drawn to groups yet lack a will to organize politically? Dependent and independent trends are clashing in new forms.
According to the Center for Generational Studies, "Over the past 50 years, Americans have become increasingly individualistic and therefore want to feel less dependent on each other. The "fear of strangers, the increased pace of life and the diversity of culture" may have caused this. It speculates "young people, growing up in this environment, have naturally emulated these practices and become detached themselves."
Everyone from Mr. Rogers telling a student he or she was special from a young age, to students' Baby Boomer parents wanting the best for them, to college seniors and friends, students picking their majors are bombarded with signals telling them what to do with their college experience and their life.
Hoyle asked why so many people go to graduate or law school right after graduation. "Do they want to be lawyers?" he said. "No, but they don't know what they want to do."
Dean, who went to graduate school soon after college advises students, "If you're not a serious student, you shouldn't be going to graduate school. You're just going to get blown out."
Faculty and staff agree on this: Students should not follow the crowd, expect everything to work out perfectly and live life without passion or else they will do themselves a great disservice.
"I didn't sit down at a young age and plan out my life," Leary said. "Some may do it, but I suspect it won't work out very well. My life made perfect sense as I lived it, but it wasn't anything I planned."