Undergrad business majors are retards, news at 11



this is news? it's not just biz undergrads, either- ever been to college? 90% morons.
 
pretty much. Fun quote from a business professor at McGill in Montreal:

"The object of undergraduate business education is to educate people, not to give them a lot of functional business stuff."
 
Yeah this is pretty much true. I'm taking a business class this Semester, haven't gone to a single class, spend 30 minutes/week on it outside of class and am getting a good grade in it. Our compsci counselor tells any student who needs to boost their GPA to just take a business class.
 
Ha not surprised. I was graduated with a Pol Sci and International Affairs degree and am doing better on the business side than most of my friends that graduated with Business degrees.

I will say however that the GMAT test is a bitch and is mainly Math and English/reading comprehension. It requires you to try and remember mathematical equations that you probably never learned about unless you were a math major or if you did learn about them, it would have been back in high school algebra or calc. The business schools do not do a great job preparing their students for the GMAT. From what I have seen, a Psychology student takes more relevant class work that would prepare them for GMAT than Business majors do.
 
papajohn56 said:
pretty much. Fun quote from a business professor at McGill in Montreal:

"The object of undergraduate business education is to educate people, not to give them a lot of functional business stuff."
Click to expand...

Wow, that's so dumb and yet so true. I'm amazed a business professor would even admit that publicly.
 
Here's the thing about business schools: they are usually the largest section of a college. Undergrad business programs are usually filled with 100+ people in each class, often 200+ depending on the size of the school.

So, given the size of the classes and the fact that until your last year with capstone courses, all the classes are fairly easy to skate by in. This leads to people who don't know that much practical knowledge because their class sizes led them to just study to get by and not participate in heated debates during the class.

The MBA degrees are usually when most people getting a business degree learn something, and that's after they've already had job experience. Their class sizes are smaller and they are forced to participate.

Now, if you go to a smaller school where the average class size is 30 or so, the undergrad students are much more adept because they are forced to participate or it's easily noticed and the teachers teaching the class are the actual ones grading their work so they know if someone isn't getting it.

Bottom line: it's up to the student to determine how much they get out of a course.
 
Don't just look at the students, look at the curriculum... it's terrible. At UT-K, it's a requirement for all business majors to take a class on Access. yes. Access.
 
Undergraduate Business major = University Cash cow. Standardized curriculum that doesn't require labs or expensive equipment, you can load classes up with tons of kids (or even do them online), and sometimes charge higher tuition just for a biz major than every other major (was like this at my college, business paid higher tuition than engineering/science).
 
Code: 
Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida,
 believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. 
But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of 
anything else that their parents would have called studying.


Does Dr. Mason know that parents of 2011 students didn't have all the streams of knowledge that have theirs sons and not only textbooks?
 
Flash4Ever said:
Code: 
Dr. Mason, who teaches economics at the University of North Florida,
 believes his students are just as intelligent as they’ve always been. 
But many of them don’t read their textbooks, or do much of 
anything else that their parents would have called studying.


Does Dr. Mason know that parents of 2011 students didn't have all the streams of knowledge that have theirs sons and not only textbooks?
Click to expand...

You act as if a large amount of business majors use these streams of knowledge. Or college students in general.
 
Falian said:
Don't just look at the students, look at the curriculum... it's terrible. At UT-K, it's a requirement for all business majors to take a class on Access. yes. Access.
Click to expand...

Sadly enough, there are a ton, A TON, of businesses that operate on small access databases scattered throughout the company. There are also a ton, A TON, of businesses that run their entire business off large Excel spreadsheets.

Here's how this works in larger businesses: a new ERP or whatever system gets implemented because the CEO was golfing buddies with other people who are talking up their awesome new system. So, the CEO gets it implemented.

A month or two goes by and throughout that process, the team implementing it didn't even bother to sell the actual employees using it on it. Since it doesn't work around their work-method of getting shit done and they don't see the benefit or time savings, they just find ways to get around it by using their own Excel or Access databases to make shit work.

People use what they know best until they realize something better is out there. That's why Access is still taught and why companies are making a killing off capitalizing on these companies that have employees that use large Access databases and large Spreadsheets so that they can integrate their data into a central location.
 
ITT: hurr durr.

"The object of undergraduate business education is to educate people, not to give them a lot of functional business stuff." <-- based on feedback from industry.

I did undergrad business. It sucked. I am now doing a postgrad course at the business school with a bunch of people from science and engineering. And I know something that you science people here seem to have forgot; I can't draw any conclusions based on such a small sample, no matter how thick these science and engineering people are.
 
papajohn56 said:
You act as if a large amount of business majors use these streams of knowledge. Or college students in general.
Click to expand...

I have a Math university degree and happy of this but as business owner I think I should have done zero with only the skills from official textbooks.
The same for all the web start-up companies of the last 10 years.
You can't judge a whole generation as business majors by the numbers of official textbooks read.
 
This isn't that surprising honestly. As anyone who's gone through an engineering degree in undergrad knows you and all your colleagues will typically look down on the business degree folks as those trying to take it easy and mostly just have something that's not challenging to fill the space between their alcohol induced blackouts.

I'm considering getting an MBA myself now and I definitely think I've been better prepared for it from having a computer science degree and running my own business than I would have from a business degree. All of the basic stuff they teach you is really easy to teach yourself from reading a few books and doing a small amount of research as you go.

It seems to me business education below the MBA level is not really useful for anyone most positions they can fill are more easily filled by promoting workers into management and hiring specialized accountants or the small business owner teaching himself the finance skills. Any larger company will look for graduate level educated people for any of the other positions leaving those with only an undergraduate level of business training and nothing else with only the chance to be middle management and typically poor middle management as they aren't very in touch with what their workers are doing.

It seems the problem stems from the universities not having the balls to fail high percentage of their students because they'll lose out on tons of their money. So they just have to keep dumbing down the curriculum because of the high percentage of students in undergrad business majors who are not driven to high achievement and will do the minimum amount of work they can get by with. This presses the teachers to do things like multiple choice tests and take home tests which have the answers on google and doesn't pressure the students enough that they can't get buy drunk from Thursday to Tuesday.
 
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent." - Calvin Coolidge

Years ago, I heard a story about Microsoft preferring to hire folks who had run their own businesses. If their businesses had failed, even better. The notion was that these folks had learned a thing or two about the real world.

Don't know if the story was true, but it made sense back then. It still does today.

Another anecdote: A barista at a local Starbucks is an idiot. She can't not make a mistake. A request for a venti Pike comes back with decaf Guatemala; a venti hot chocolate comes back as a mocha; and etc. The point? She's a recent UCLA grad. lol

I wouldn't hire her.
 
justo_tx said:
<serious question>
A while back didn't you post a while back that you were changing your major from physics to business or something along those lines?
</serious question>
Click to expand...

For one of my Masters degrees (in progress). I have my physics bachelors. I was also pretty surprised by the level of math that the finance classes need at this level. Undergrad stuff is crap.

Harvard doesn't have an undergrad business major, but they sure have one of the top MBA programs.
 
amateursurgeon said:
Business Education at University = Common Sense For Those Who Have None.
Click to expand...

This, I did a 3 year Business degree and it was complete Bullshit. Subjects like International Business, Marketing were just common sense. I hate qualitative subjects in college.

The only thing I liked was Accounting which could have been actually useful. I wish I did CompSci instead.
 
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