Undergraduate Business Major a Negative?

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Question: Would majoring in something totally unrelated like molecular bio or engineering help you get into MBA Business school b/c you might have a skill others don’t have? That’s what my dad says, but I think that if you have no knowledge in business or econ, that would never work.

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<p>if you have great work experience sure.</p>

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ok…let me make this more specific…would going to Wharton, Ross, Sloan, Haas, or Stern be a disadvantage against kids from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, Duke, Columbia, etc. when applying to top MBA programs?

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<p>No, it’s not that big of a deal. This whole issue has been addressed so many times, MBA admissions are mostly a matter of your work experience. If your school has good recruiting and you actually work and do well at your job you’re good to go.</p>

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I didn’t know that we were talking about the ‘applicability’ of the curriculum. I was just talking about the regard of the program. Physics at any school, for example, tends to be highly regarded just for the sheer difficulty of the subject, regardless of the lack of applicability it may have. The thinking is that anybody who is good enough to get a physics degree is probably a hard-working and sharp guy, and hence is probably easily trainable. The exact same thinking applies when the consulting firms and investment banks would rather hire an Art History student from Harvard than a business student from, say, Southwest Missouri State, despite the lack of applicability of art history to business.

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<p>Sakky, you can’t be comparing Art history majors to Southen Missouri State business majors in this example. What I wrote was pretty specific, it was in a case of where you go to a school that’s not so great and you have both a business program and a liberal arts economics program and in those cases it’s always going to be better to pick the business program over the economics program.</p>

<p>And don’t talk about physics either, this is strictly with economics and business programs when they’re offered at the same school. I’ll agree, at MIT that’s probably the case but at most other schools it is not the case.</p>

<p>If you go to some low end school like University of Houston and they have both an economics and a business program, are you trying to argue that you’d be better off majoring in economics over business? Do you really think that would help you? I mean come on – if you graduate from University of Houston your career prospects are already going to be somewhat limited, like I said earlier you’re going to be looking at career programs where they’re not going to have intensive training like at investment banks and consulting firms, you’re going to be looking at companies that don’t have those kinds of resources and are going to want people who have a more concrete foundation on things like finance and accounting. And if you want to go from University of Houston to working for a BB bank, you’re already in a bad position because you go to a non-target, but if you had a good GPA and some actual finance and accounting knowledge it might help compared to taking the economics classes. Economics isn’t going to be as applicable as majoring in something like Finance or Accounting and you’re going to be hit with some worse job prospects, especially at a lower end school.</p>

<p>You say that I’m looking too much at the top business schools but maybe you’re not focusing enough on the kinds of jobs people get from the lower end business schools. They’re going to be jobs that will prefer business majors over liberal arts majors.</p>