CMU's Strategy for Well-Rounded B-Schoolers

Many students are pushed too hard toward professional skills—at the cost of a broader education, says the Tepper School's Milton Cofield

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Milton Cofield
Carnegie Mellon University

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To receive a business degree or a well-rounded education? That's the question many high school students are grappling with this admissions season. For many of them, the focus has shifted away from the liberal arts and toward the professional aspect of a degree, says Milton Cofield, executive director for undergraduate business administration at Carnegie Mellon University's Tepper School of Business.

In Cofield's six years at CMU, this shift in applicants' thought processes has become more apparent—not a positive change in Cofield's view. However, Tepper is doing something to create well-rounded graduates.

Cofield, who earned an MBA at Wharton and a PhD. in chemistry from the University of Illinois, recently chatted with BusinessWeek.com reporter Julie Gordon about the professionalization of the business degree and other admissions-related issues. An edited transcript of their conversation follows:

Why is there a shift toward professionalization of the business degree?

I think it's because of the information that's out there. When you look at the amount of informational focus that's put on MBA programs in particular and now increasingly on undergraduate programs, this information focuses on their professional nature. I think that has drifted down to the undergraduate business programs and has the students conceiving of their experience in a similar way to what students who go in the MBA programs think about the objective that they have for their experience.

So are students looking at college as less of a broad, liberal-arts type of education then?

I think they absolutely are.

Is that a positive or negative thing?

I think that's actually a very negative thing. A student entering an MBA program has an undergraduate degree and a substantial amount of experience. Out of that, they would probably have a sense of the value of many different parts of their educational experience as related to their goals that they're setting for themselves. I think students in undergrad programs won't have that kind of focus. And they can overlook what the liberal-education components of an undergraduate experience is supposed to do.

What can Tepper—or other schools—do to combat that mentality?

What we're trying to do is be clear in our message about how we see our undergraduate educational experience. You have to work very hard to make sure that your students actually have a breadth of experience so they can develop a greater appreciation for, again, the value of that broad, liberal-education experience.

Then do high-school students think they're applying specifically to Tepper or to Carnegie Mellon in general?

I'm going to talk about Tepper, [but] the things I'm talking to you about are general for a certain elite group of undergraduate programs. I think all of the students who apply to these types of programs view themselves as applying directly to the business-school program more than they do to applying to the university at large.

But the admissions process is actually run through the undergraduate-admissions office and not through the college. So they know they're applying to the undergraduate-admissions office, but they're so directed by…this professionalization of what they think their undergraduate experience is supposed to be about, that they see themselves as directly applying to programs.

Also, here at Tepper, all students are admitted to programs, they aren't admitted as general freshmen in the freshman class. So when students apply to our university for admission, they're applying against an admission pool for that specific program.