“Business Major” “Business University”
Its not a business degree. Its a business econ major. There is a difference. By conflating the two, he is basically making an argument that a business econ major somehow magically transforms the university to a “business university”, whatever that means. But that is illogical… how in the world does 1 major nullify the character of all the other majors, including his own (philosophy and politics)? It is just not logical.
“Law schools, graduate programs, and employers broadly consider undergraduate business programs unserious and disreputable. No academic institution of the caliber of the University of Chicago offers a business major—unless one includes the Wharton School…”
Ha ha ha ha ha ha. This is a bunch of baloney. UPenn/Wharton, Cal-Berkeley/Haas, MIT/Sloan, Cornell/Dyson… Even if we accept the misrepresentation that the major is a business degree not a business econ major, have UChicago students really gone so far as to refer to these schools as if they are trash? I mean, they repeat at number #3 in USNWR and all of a sudden everyone else but H/S is “disreputable” now? Wow, just wow…
If the info being talked about is right, the College is where they mostly will be in their first year and second year. The world-class Econ department is where they get many of their classes in their third. And the world-class Booth school is involved in their fourth.
I see zero weak spot in terms of quality. It’s definitely better than any biology pre-med considering that Pritzker is a second tier US program or fifth tier worldwide program. One can make an argument that this Business econ will even have a better reputation from the get go than even Comp Sci, or Math, or Chem, or… This makes his claim of “less academically demanding and intellectually rewarding” bunk.
And no, Booth faculty, except for the adjuncts who mostly teach entrepreneurship, are all PhDs in Econ, Sociology, Psychology, Math, Linguistics,… so the whole idea that business econ will be taught by less than qualified teachers is nothing but uninformed bias masking itself as informed opinion. I mean, a “technical vocational school”? Has this kid attended one class at Booth? Self-aggrandizing much?
“But from its inception…”
I’m sorry but this revisionist article is plain wrong. Booth started as an undergrad institution in commerce and politics. This erasure of UChicago history is fake news, period. His ignorance of the university’s history is not an excuse for passing off fiction as fact.
Hard to take the author seriously with so much #fakenews