<p>Traditionally, undergrad business majors were indeed looked down upon, and were considered training that might get a job after graduation in the lower level of an organization without access to higher management positions over the long term.</p>
<p>Forty years ago, I think much of top management was filled from Ivies and other selective schools that were still aristocracies, rather than meritocracies: white males from certain backgrounds who operated on family and social connections. I think it is still true that those who majored in rigorous non-vocational subjects, whether art history or economics, have better long term job prospects in management, finance and many other fields too. Coming from an Ivy or other top school can still help, but access to higher echelons of industry and business may have opened up a bit over the decades for kids from other types of schools. (Still, the desperate desire to get into Ivies etc. demonstrates the persistence of an impression, anyway, that those from elite schools end up in higher echelons in work as well.)</p>
<p>With the much touted ethic of equal opportunity in the US, financial aid, greater social mobility in general, and intense pressure for all to “go to college,” many of the students who would not have gone to college 40 years ago are now going, but with a more practical bent than those who went to enrich their minds in the old days. Hence the influx into undergrad business majors at many non-elite schools. </p>
<p>Of course, those who entered Ivies through the boarding school pipeline in the 1950’s and 1960’s were raised with certain cultural expectations that they would know some literature, art, music and history. With the social changes of the later '60’s and 1970’s, there is no longer a canon and there is no longer an aristocracy to learn it either. Western literature and art are no just another course in the curriculum, not the core, because that would be ethnocentric.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to wander, but questions about undergrad business and art history raise questions of recent social history, and I hate to utter the word, class. And things are evolving. So for the most part (Penn excluded) Ivies don’t offer undergrad business (though at one point 40+% of Harvard grads were going into finance). Undergrad business is considered in some quarters to be vocational and thus lower “class.” In fact, a school like Northeastern, with its coop and vocational focus, used to be seen as lower class.</p>
<p>Fact of the matter is that things are changing in many ways, economically and culturally. Northeastern has risen dramatically in reputation in recent years, and many visits to admissions at many schools now emphasize internships and career. As years go by and the students in undergrad business and other career-focused majors do well in the work world (and are able to pay back their loans), perception will change still more.</p>
<p>At some point, with information sources also changing, it is possible that liberal arts majors will dwindle. How man students growing up in front of multiple screens with instant access to any information and an increasingly rapid fire attention span are going to want to study Chaucer or Giotto?</p>
<p>So I think it helps to see these questions as reflecting very broad social changes over decades and as part of an evolution that will continue. America doesn’t like to talk about class except in terms of mobility and success: the last 5 decades have been very interesting in this regard.</p>