S24 chose Business as a default as he definitely didn’t want sciences and business is practical option to ensure job after college. I also encouraged him to start in Business because easier to transfer out than in. Because of this his choice will more based on the college vs major which will likely be Ohio State but still waiting on Kelley petition and Mich State DA decisions. He is a varsity basketball player so the rec center and intramural sports are also an important priority! 
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I love how helpful this string is. Lots of good information and perspective shared….
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We also did a lot of Poets and Quants research…TCU’s tuition was not high on our list - our guy knew some merit would be needed. Elon was so white glove - it was just an awesome experience all the way around from a personalized tour guide to a personal acceptance letter talking about details from his app. I loved every part of it but S24 wants bigger with more opportunity. So we wait for the big ones and see…he just loves Wisconsin in all the ways. He will be fine wherever he goes, even if there’s some disappointment next Friday.
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Haha - the Rec center is important to us as well!!!
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Us too. For business at OSU, where are you think best part of campus to live? North?
Yes, the OSU business campus in North, but not sure how much of their classes are there Freshman year.
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Here’s an article from today’s Automotive News - it’s pretty good. Talks about possibly moving manufacturing, securing cuts to prices in an inflationary market (and the supplier reactions), and currency impact. This stuff isn’t being decided on the laymen level - but it’s got some of many fields, including the supply chain (procurement) mixed in…not to mention shipping from overseas.
Nissan Motor Co. has told suppliers it is considering moving U.S. production of the next-generation Rogue crossover to Japan if the automaker cannot lower its purchasing costs.
The Rogue, Nissan’s bestselling U.S. model, is built in Smyrna, Tenn., and Kyushu, Japan. The compact crossover accounts for one-third of Nissan’s sales in its largest market.
At a meeting at Nissan North America headquarters in Franklin, Tenn., on Jan. 11, the automaker told suppliers it expects a “significant reduction” in the cost of parts for the fourth-generation Rogue, scheduled to begin production in late 2026.
NISSAN BY THE NUMBERS
Nissan Smyrna, Smyrna, Tenn.
Background: Nissan is considering offshoring Rogue crossover production from its assembly plant in Smyrna, Tenn., unless it can bring down costs.
Plant investment: $7.1 billion
Work force: 6,700
Size: 6 million square feet
Annual capacity: 640,000 vehicles
Models: Nissan Leaf, Nissan Murano, Nissan Pathfinder, Nissan Rogue, Infiniti QX60
Nissan asked suppliers for an average 20 percent cut in parts pricing, people briefed on the matter told Automotive News. Some suppliers were asked to slash prices by up to 30 percent.
At the meeting, attended by Nissan Americas Chairperson Jeremie Papin, Nissan North America manufacturing chief David Johnson and Nissan Americas procurement boss Andrew Wareing, the automaker said it builds the Rogue for 20 percent less in Japan than in the U.S. Nissan said it has reduced its internal manufacturing costs in the U.S. by 18 percent.
“They told us that if we can’t get closer to Japan’s cost, they will move production [to Kyushu],” said a supplier who attended the meeting and asked not to be identified.
Nissan spokesman Brian Brockman declined to comment on the details of the supplier meeting but said that the automaker regularly engages in discussions with “stakeholders, including suppliers, to ensure competitiveness in our product offerings.”
Losing the Rogue would be an enormous blow to Nissan’s 6-million-square-foot Smyrna assembly plant, which employs 6,700 workers. The Rogue accounts for about 40 percent of the factory’s annual output — or nearly 200,000 vehicles. Nissan sold 271,458 Rogue crossovers in the U.S. last year, a 46 percent increase over 2022.
Nissan is expected to pull U.S. production of another key model — the electric Leaf hatchback.
Nissan will not build the reincarnation of America’s first volume EV in Smyrna, Automotive News reported late last year. U.S. production of the current-generation Leaf at the plant is scheduled to end in mid-2025.
Nissan’s U.S. factories in Smyrna and Canton, Miss., currently at 52 percent combined capacity utilization, need volume products to operate profitably, said Sam Fiorani, AutoForecast Solutions vice president.
“Pushing the Rogue to Japan will add considerable red ink to Nissan’s U.S. ledgers,” Fiorani said. “Closing a plant could be in Nissan’s future.”
Under pressure
To make room in Japan for U.S. production, if it comes to that, Nissan could free up Rogue capacity at its southwestern Japan factory by shifting some production to China, sources said.
“That’s a game changer,” a supplier said. “It was considered an idle threat that Nissan could accommodate all the U.S. Rogue capacity in Japan. But if they are opening up capacity, that’s a different story.”
Nissan has asked suppliers to submit price quotes on the new Rogue by the end of this week. Nissan North America will present its manufacturing cost plan to Nissan Motor Co. executives by the end of January. In February, Nissan should determine whether the next Rogue will continue to be built stateside.
Original equipment manufacturers typically turn to suppliers first when trying to cut costs, said Daniel Rustmann, co-chair of the global automotive practice at Butzel Long.
“But I’ve never heard of [an original equipment manufacturer] asking for this magnitude of price reduction and threatening to move a whole vehicle production to another country,” Rustmann said. “Nissan could be concerned about union organizing efforts increasing, and [it’s] trying to find ways to cut their costs.”
In January, Nissan hiked top wages for workers at its nonunion U.S. manufacturing plants by 10 percent after the UAW reached new and more generous contracts with the Detroit 3. A resurgent UAW has vowed to unionize the tens of thousands of workers at nonunion vehicle assembly plants scattered across the South, Midwest and California.
Automakers and their supply chains everywhere are combating inflation.
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With the cost of goods sold running 10 to 20 percent above budgets on materials, energy and labor costs in 2022, automotive suppliers are under pressure, according to a Bain & Co. report.
Parts makers have had limited success in passing input cost increases to automakers, who are hunkering down as rising interest rates tap the brakes on new-vehicle demand.
Bain research shows that one-fifth of suppliers can recover about 70 percent of their additional costs from inflation, while the majority achieve lower cost pass-through levels of 40 to 50 percent.
A supplier said it is less expensive for Nissan to import the Rogue than it is for the company to build it here.
Pushback
The automaker’s cost reduction mandate took some suppliers aback.
“We are not going to sell parts at a loss; we’re not going to lose money,” a supplier said. “If that means we’ll [lose the business and] have to downsize operations here, so be it.”
Suppliers said material costs and wages are higher in the U.S. than in Japan, which is out of their control. “Steel is 20 percent cheaper, the labor rate is 50 percent lower” in Japan, one supplier said. Like other automakers, Nissan negotiates the price of its steel and aluminum — major input costs — on suppliers’ behalf.
“Sixty percent of my quote is material,” a supplier said. “I can’t fix the material cost that Nissan and the steel companies negotiated.”
Nor is the yen-dollar exchange rate helping U.S. suppliers’ cost competitiveness relative to their Japanese rivals. The dollar has surged more than 40 percent against the yen since 2020, making U.S.-built parts more expensive than those produced in Japan.
“Is there something we can do to improve our cost efficiency? Absolutely,” another supplier said. “But we can’t arbitrarily just reduce our costs by 20 percent.”
Tables turning
Leading up to the pandemic, auto suppliers’ profit margins were, on average, 1 to 2 percentage points higher than those of their automaker customers.
But surging material and labor costs, a global microchip shortage and volatile production schedules have squeezed supplier bottom lines in recent years.
According to a Bain analysis, automakers had an average profit margin of 8.9 percent in the third quarter of 2023 — 3 percentage points higher than automotive suppliers’ margins. Suppliers’ average profit margins tumbled to 4.7 percent in 2022 from 8.1 percent five years earlier.
“This is a bad time for Nissan to be asking for price concessions of this scale because the supply base almost universally has been struggling under the weight of inflationary pressures and other factors increasing costs and driving down margins the last two years,” Rustmann said. “There’s no way that any supplier could reduce its cost by 20 percent — there’d be no margin left, they’d probably be selling at a loss.”
Fiorani said that while the largest suppliers might have the balance sheet to withstand steep price cuts, hundreds of smaller suppliers could have to walk away from the Nissan business.
“If nobody can afford to provide a competitive part, the remaining manufacturers could control the market and work counter to Nissan’s intentions,” the analyst said. “Nissan requires a free market of companies helping to build the crossover.”
My kid did a fair amount of shadowing in HS. There were lots of school vacation days where the rest of the business and manufacturing world was still working. We were fortunate to have a lot of folks in our circle who were willing to have her go to work with them. Lots of her HS STEM teachers also came from industry so there were lots of conversations with them as well.
My guy was football, and the rec center/intramural aspect is important to him too!
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While we are prepping for Wisconsin deferral, curious if anyone has insight on alternative business routes. Ie. some research shows that while Wisconsin says B school admission is attainable as pre-business admit…student reporting say otherwise.
S24 initial interest is in Marketing (he actually loves history and politics too so curious if he might enjoy Economics); so wondering if he got in, alternative paths to Business School like Economics and Consumer Behavior/Marketplace at School of Human Ecology and if that might be viable option. Welcome any helpful experience and perspective here?
I have no helpful firsthand knowledge. I will say, there are certainly many paths to a successful business career. Economics is a fairly obvious alternative major. When considering any major, you can pull up on the Internet the required classes for that major at the specific university, and compare those to the required classes for the previously desired major in the business school. For Wisconsin, at least for business, you can pull up a four year plan for the major and see which courses are slotted in which year. This is a really granular look of what you would do academically for four years at that school.
If you’re son is considering marketing, there seem to be lots of related majors, not in the business school, such as communications, psychology or anthropology. I would think someone in those majors that took some data analytics classes would have a lot of valuable skills for marketing. But he would have to like the specific courses he would take in that major, to be successful in the major. If he is unsure of exactly what he wants to study, and likes a lot of different things (like history and politics) coming in general studies can be great. And it could allow him to explore. His internship and first job will likely be less about the degree and more about the hustle/networking.
S24 is looking for a major within a business school in part because he would prefer to minimize humanities and social science requirements, including foreign language, (subjects he was less interested in high school) and maximize practical hands-on business-specific classes (classes he sought out and enjoyed in high school). One thing about the Wisconsin 4 year curriculum, at least in finance, is that the major classes are loaded in the first couple years and the humanities gen eds don’t show up till senior year. That is great for a kid that might need some more time to mature before taking those classes and/or doesn’t want those classes showing up in his GPA when applying for internships. (This is my S24.) But if your son would like to explore some of those humanities and social sciences, the Wisconsin school might not provide the best way for him to do that. Of course… this assumes I have correctly understood the course listings and graduation requirements posted by Wisconsin on the Internet— It’s possible possible to sample 4 year plan I saw was just a sample and not the required path.
One main difference. Economists generally need a phd to be called and be working as an economist whereas as business major can be operating in that career field right after undergrad and an MBA is icing on the cake
I was thinking of a scenario where someone majored in Econ and then worked in a business job, not as an economist. Lots of kids at my daughter’s LAC major in Econ and then go into finance jobs. (Other popular routes to finance jobs from LACs are applied math and computer science).
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Yes but why wouldn’t those employers hire a finance grad?
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Somewhere on CC there is a great string on investment banking. All the IB jobs hire out of top LACs, as well as top finance. They will teach kids what they need to know when the get to the job. You probably have a better chance of getting into investment banking as an art history major at Williams College than as a finance major at a Big 10. IB loves prestige. And those top LACs are all about prestige, connections and money. It’s a different world. If you are interested look for investment banking thread on this site—it has sooo much info. That’s not my world, so I defer to the folks on that post.
That said, most finance kids don’t want to do IB. They want normal finance jobs. And a finance degree is great for that. There are also tons of people working in business with English, history, etc. degrees so a business degree is not the only option.
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very interesting–i look for that thread!
I should have said … it depends on the employer. For example, my daughter was looking at consulting jobs and this was the list of majors that one firm hired from:
Actuarial Science, Business Administration, Computer Science, Cybersecurity, Economics, Engineering, Finance, Information Systems, Math and Statistics
That’s a pretty wide range! Most big multi-national or national companies will have lengthy internal training for a position. Or kids rotate through a job training program to learn different areas. The most important thing is that you are smart and hardworking and good with details (hence the engineering major!)—if you have those qualities any bank/consulting firm/corporation will teach you what you need to know. Lots of banks actually use outside vendors (like training the street) to get liberal arts kids up to speed.
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Found it!
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I can attest to this exactly - I interned as a college student at one of the most quietly elite boutique investment banks in NY for 2 summers due to family connection and they recruited from Williams College as one of their primary feeding schools over business schools.
On another note - my S24 thinks he wants marketing and finance…but has a lot of world and discovery ahead of him. He’s a strong relationship builder so I see all sorts of business potential for him, but not sure I see the investment banking world as a happy place for him.
I was more curious if anyone had personal info or experience about those routes - specifically the College of Human Ecology (I find this an interesting alternative, but wonder if taken as seriously has B School).
Nevertheless, I shouldn’t be doing this research…I have faith and trust he’ll figure it out via his own research. Curiosity and obsessive nature is getting the best of me.
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I think @MSBhelen22 was asking about alternatives for a student interested in marketing, not for IB althiugh they played in the IB discussion.
I think a company that will hire a student into a generalist or rotational - they can all get to marketing. Marketing is not a closed field. They may not start there but they can get there.
The question is - some will hire any major and that person might even start in a call center, for example. That’s how my industry was but now call centers are outsourced.
But I see kids in business roles from majors including sports, business, geology, stats/math, polo sci, etc. of course, marketing often includes not just marcomm but product management, pricing and other areas. Today social media knowledge is a must - an area myself and some older colleagues lack.
Other companies might prefer business students.
But today so many social science majors have a quant component. And while marketing historically was the fluff major in business (like when I got my mba 25 years ago) - many programs do run quantitatively today.
So I think any major that has quant components will be fine, but maybe not for every organization.
At least in my opinion…
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