Why Undergraduate Business School.

Canuckguy
Sun, 31 May 2009 22:29:23 +0000

bdl108:

I don’t want to pile on, and have no intention of doing so. Since I started this “incident”, I should at least clarify what my position is.

Arguing in terms of liberal arts vs. business is too fuzzy to be helpful. It would help a great deal to specify what major we are comparing. Do not group physical sciences, biological sciences, social sciences and humanities together and talk about them as one single entity. There is a world of difference, qualitatively speaking, between a physics major and a sociology major. Just check the GRE scores of the students in the various disciplines which I posted earlier and you would know exactly where I am going. (The same, of course, goes for business. There is a big difference between those going into human resources vs. those in high finance). When I heard people talk about liberal arts as a single entity, I know they are trying to “obscure”.

Next question has to do with the specific programme, and thus the college where the student studied. Since CC is obsessed with rankings, I don’t think I need to say more about it.

All my degrees are in what are called interdisciplinary areas. (I was attracted to Dr. Johnson’s notion of someone who “knows something about everything, and everything about something”). My first was in Chinese politics with a minor in symbolic logic and quantitative methods. I was not impressed by the liberal arts majors in my classes, to say the least. They did not want to study Chinese nor research design. The excuses given does not fly with me, I know they find them too challenging. So, when I hear this thing about critical thinking and liberal arts…well, I am from Missouri on this one.

BTW, I do not have a business degree.