SAT写作Is Business Undergraduate Major justified_SAT写作

SAT写作Is Business Undergraduate Major justified

　　Scholars in the field point to three sources of trouble. First, as long ago as 1959, a Ford Foundation report warned that too many undergraduate business students chose their majors by default. Business programs also attract more than their share of students who approach college in purely instrumental terms, as a plausible path to a job, not out of curiosity about, say, Ronald Coases theory of the firm.

　　Business education has come to be defined in the minds of students as a place for developing elite social networks and getting access to corporate recruiters, says Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School who is a prominent critic of the field. Its an attitude that Dr. Khurana first saw in M.B.A. programs but has migrated, he says, to the undergraduate level.

　　Second, in management and marketing, no strong consensus has emerged about what students ought to learn or how they ought to learn it. And finally, with large student-faculty ratios and no lab equipment, business has historically been cheaper to operate than most departments. Cynics say many colleges are content.

　　At the big public universities, the administrations need us to be credible, but Im not sure that they need us to be very good, says J. David Hunger, a scholar-in-residence in the management program at the College of St. Benedict and St. Johns University, in Collegeville, Minn. They need us to be cash cows.

　　IN Academically Adrift, Dr. Arum and Dr. Roksa looked at the performance of students at 24 colleges and universities. At the beginning of freshman year and end of sophomore year, students in the study took the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a national essay test that assesses students writing and reasoning skills. During those first two years of college, business students scores improved less than any other groups. Communication, education and social-work majors had slightly better gains; humanities, social science, and science and engineering students saw much stronger improvement.