Business: The New Liberal Art

Interest in business is surging at elite liberal arts colleges, and schools that once shunned the business major are now offering coursework

By Adam Fusfeld

Ever since fleeing Europe's tyranny for the New World, Americans have established a collegiate system which emphasizes a broad, liberal arts education. Even as larger state schools mimicked European universities and offered undergraduate majors in vocational fields, the Ivy League schools and their peers, for the most part, resisted. "In America, we think more in terms of a broad undergraduate education," says Paul Danos, dean of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business (Tuck Full-Time MBA Profile). "Other parts of the world are much more specific. They believe in the benefit of students going directly into their major and taking several years of very narrow, technical work. We don't think of it that way."

But as the financial industry becomes an increasingly sought-after destination for talented undergraduates, some top schools are reconsidering that age-old bias. In the last three years, liberal arts colleges that once shunned the business major have begun making business courses available to undergrads. And with the job market in turmoil, interest in these programs has surged. At Tuck, growing demand has led the school to triple the number of business classes it offers. Columbia, which has seen increased interest among undergrads for the business courses in its catalog, is considering a program similar to one at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management that yields a business certificate upon completion. That program itself has been so popular that it expanded just a year after its inception.

Once wholly committed to their vision of students well-versed in philosophy, history, and science, these schools appear to be changing course. According to Amir Ziv, vice-dean at Columbia Business School (Columbia Full-Time MBA Profile), behind this shift in attitude is "a lot of demand from the undergrads to know something about business."

For liberal arts students, a little bit of business knowhow is a powerful thing, giving them the confidence they need to work in a business setting. "It's hard for students coming from a liberal arts education not to feel disadvantaged when they're up against students from, say, the Wharton (Wharton Undergraduate Business Profile) undergraduate program," says Charles Friedland, a senior majoring in economics at Dartmouth. Friedland, 21, accepted a summer internship offer last spring from Bank of America (BAC) without a single credit in business to his name. But as one of the students to enroll in financial accounting, the first Tuck business class ever offered to undergraduate students, he had the credit by his first day of work. "After the first or second day of the internship, it was already evident how much taking the class helped in terms of being comfortable in the atmosphere of a large finance firm," he says.

The last thing highly ranked schools want is for a large number of students to be at a perceived disadvantage when vying for full-time jobs. "Students realize that when they go to their first job they want to know something about business," says Ziv. "If you've had an accounting class, that gives you an advantage. You understand what profit-and-loss sheets are and what balance sheets are. And that helps."

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