Business: Big Major on Campus

A flight to safety is driving up enrollment at many undergraduate business programs, but that's making it tougher to get in

The business major is experiencing a surge in popularity among students.

By Alison Damast

Every fall, Linda Salchenberger, dean of Marquette University's College of Business Administration (Marquette Undergraduate Business Profile), meets with parents of freshman students to welcome them to the school and gauge their expectations for the years ahead. This year, she stood in front of a group of 400 of them and posed a question she thought would receive a lukewarm response in today's challenging economic climate.

"I asked, 'How many of you are optimistic about the job prospects for your students four years from now,' and I'd say easily three-quarters of them raised their hand," she says.

That was just the first bit of good news Salchenberger received. Enrollment in the freshman class is up 7% over last year and the school just welcomed its largest ever freshman, sophomore, and junior classes to campus, she says.

This is a scenario being played out on the campuses of many colleges and universities across the country this fall. Driven by the recession and one of the largest incoming freshman classes in the nation's history, the business major is experiencing a surge in popularity among students. Dozens of business schools, including Emory University's Goizueta Business School (Goizueta Undergraduate Business Profile), Santa Clara University's Leavey School of Business (Santa Clara Undergraduate Business Profile), and the University of Scranton's Kania School of Management (Scranton Undergraduate Business Profile) are reporting an uptick in their entering freshman classes, with many boasting record enrollment and interest from high school graduates. At some schools, enrollment is up by as much as 10% or 15%, stretching them to capacity and, in some cases, forcing admissions officers to be more selective and tighten their criteria.

Starting Salaries Take a Hit

Deans and admissions officers say students and parents are increasingly viewing the business major as the most practical major in this economy, one that will put them in the best position to land a job after graduation. Increasingly, many who intended to become liberal arts majors are switching gears to business, or double majoring, pursuing a degree in history, for example, at the same time as one in finance, administrators say.

Many of these students are positioning themselves for what they hope will be an economic recovery down the road. However, their confidence in a business degree as the key to jump-starting their careers may be misplaced, especially if they graduate in the next year or two. Business graduates have been as hard hit by the downturn as most majors, a trend that shows no signs of abating, and their salaries are not faring much better. According to a July report from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the average starting salary for 2009 college graduates with bachelor's degrees in business increased less than 1%, to $47,239. Some business majors fared especially poorly. Business administration majors saw their salaries sink 2.1%, to $44,944. Meanwhile, economics graduates saw their salaries dip by 1.3%, to $49,829, according to the report.

Even so, business has always been a popular major among undergraduates. In academic year 2006-07, the largest number of bachelor's degrees conferred was in business (21%), followed by social sciences and history (11%), education (7%), and health sciences (7%), according to the most recent figures available from the Education Dept.'s National Center for Education Statistics. Fueling that trend, many students enter college already knowing they want to become business majors; nearly 17% of full-time freshmen at four-year colleges across the country said they planned to major in business in the fall of 2008, according to data from the latest national student survey conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles' Higher Education Research Institute.

Majoring in Business as an Investment

Though enrollment figures for fall 2009 are not yet available, John Fernandes, president of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), a leading accreditation group, says he expects that trend to continue its upward spiral this academic year. He says he's heard anecdotally from a number of schools that business is the most popular major this year on campus, with many students even choosing to pursue double majors within the business school, such as a finance-and-accounting combination. That's a strategy students believe will give them more concrete skills and an edge when they enter the job market, Fernandes says.

"Any time the economy looks difficult, that means undergraduates will look towards a degree that they can more quickly apply to a job. And students see business as the major with the greatest likelihood of getting one," Fernandes says.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.