<p>
</p>
<p>I am not arguing that one is better than the other. That’s my whole point - that I don’t think you can make a general statement one way or another. I believe it varies from school to school and thus has to be taken on a case-by-case situation. At some schools, business may be better than economics. At others, economics may be better than business. </p>
<p>I agree with you that business classes are probably more pragmatically useful than are economics classes. But the countervailing phenomenom is that many schools have business programs that are rather well-known, at least within their region, for housing the rather unstudious and least academically capable students. That’s why I keep bringing up football as a topic - for the fact is, division 1-A football players will disproportionately major in business than in economics, almost certainly because business tends to be infamous as an easy creampuff major at their schools. I would also imagine that the regional employers know that, which is why they may shy away from hiring people who majored in business. </p>
<p>In, I distinctly remember how a few years ago, one of my friend’s who works in HR for a large company said that her company will no longer hire business grads from a certain local school for the simple reason that the ones they ever hired in the past turned out to be conspicuously lazy. The company decided they’d rather hire people who graduated from other majors at the school in order to avoid the problem of laziness. Let’s be perfectly honest. Some business programs are notoriously ‘soft’ in that students can graduate while doing very little work. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>No, I think you’re overlooking the other aspects of what a school is all about. The truth is, most business jobs are really not that hard to do, in that, it wouldn’t take a hard-working person much time to train to learn what they need to know to do the job. What you can’t train is a work ethic. Either a person is hard-working, or he isn’t. And the fact is, sadly, a lot of business majors at the low-end schools simply aren’t hard-working. In fact, that’s why a lot of them chose to become business majors - because the sad truth is that many business programs, especially at the low-end schools, are easy.</p>
<p>And that’s the real crux of the matter right there. The truth is, all of this really boils down to signals you are sending to the market. Nobody really knows how good of an employee you are going to be, which is why they have to rely on market signals. If you major in economics, then while your education may not be completely applicable to a business job, you’re signalling to the market that, if nothing else, at least you’re not lazy. However, if you’re a business major from that same school, employers can’t be so sure. Like I said, my friend works for an employer who’s been burned in the past by lazy business majors.</p>