Blending liberal arts & business education

Liberal Education, Wntr, 2004 by E. Byron Chew, Cecilia McInnis-Bowers

BUSINESS EDUCATORS AND COLLEAGUES in the liberal arts have not found the ideal bridge, from the student's perspective, that provides a meaningful connection between the two domains. Over the years, challenges to effectively bridge the divide between liberal arts and business have come from leaders in education, the professional business community, and from business education accrediting organizations. Words like bridging and embedding have been used to conceptually suggest the constructs of association. Most recently, the need to go beyond bridging or embedding to a more seamless approach to blending the domains has been asserted. Professional studies, such as business, should be approached as liberal education: "[T]here should be an end to the traditional, artificial distinctions between liberal and practical education" (AAC & U 2003).

Colleagues from business and liberal arts must explore and challenge the intent and consequences of the separation, indeed dissociation, between their respective domains, particularly from the student's perspective. This dissociation is grounded in the historical evolution of higher education itself, with liberal education's domain broadening knowledge and thinking in contrast to professional studies, i.e. business, narrowing to focus on development of applied skills. However, dissociation between the domains exacerbates the problems of business students' neither perceiving the value in general education courses nor demonstrating cohesive and connected learning outcomes. Such curricular separation may thwart the ability of a student in business to become a liberally educated leader and manager.

Using one small, traditional liberal arts college's experience as an example, ways of blending these domains, rather than bridging the phantom yet palpable chasm between, are discussed here.

The benefits of constructing programs of study that effectively prepare the liberally educated business professional have been well recognized and discussed for over a century. In 1890, Charles William Elliot, president of Harvard, commented that the object of a good education for business people would require development of "accuracy in observation, quickness and certainty in seizing upon the main points of a new subject, and discrimination in separating the trivial from the important in great masses of facts," and that "liberal education develops a sense of right, duty and honor." Further, he emphasized the need for communication and values, two things believed to directly emanate from a liberal education (Eliot 1923).

The call for grounding the budding business professional in the liberal arts was again echoed during the mid-1900s when both the Carnegie Foundation (Pierson, et al. 1959) and Ford Foundation (Gordon and Howell 1959) commissioned studies to review the content of undergraduate business education. Indicating that the business professional needs education in the basic disciplines rather than technical skills, these reports emphasized the importance of a business education grounded in the traditional basic disciplines of a liberal education.

Similar expectations from the professional business community continue to be expressed. Business education accrediting organizations have sought to ensure that students are provided the breadth of a liberal arts education. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB International), the largest and oldest accrediting organization for business education, has standards for the coverage of liberal arts learning outcomes (2003).

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Bobko and Tejeda (2000) point out, "Many business schools have adopted policies that begin to embrace a liberal arts, fundamental-knowledge based approach." One of the policies cited as evidence that business schools were embracing the value of studies within the liberal arts, was the "delayed entry into under-graduate [business] programs until the third year." This matriculation recommendation supported by the Ford Foundation Study in 1959 (Gordon and Howell) was adopted as a standard of educational quality for undergraduate business education; it continues to be supported by business accrediting organizations. The presumption was that students should spend two full academic years focusing on liberal arts education to lay a foundation prior to study within the business major, which, it was assumed, would occur in the final two years.

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Bridging is indicative of the problem

"Embedding strong liberal arts content in business education appears to best position students for the flexible, increasingly global, and diverse workplace of the future ... to find informed solutions that are both technically superior as well as critically and ethically evaluated" (Bobko and Tejeda 2000). The apparently timeless call to produce liberally educated business graduates seems to suggest that the methods to address this call, indeed the documented need, have not been completely effective. One point to consider is that, for the most part, business curricula have not "embedded" liberal arts into the student's program of study, but rather have isolated it, by separating it from the business education process. Interestingly, this may be, albeit unintentionally, exemplified by traditional business schools' expecting students to complete the majority of their general education prior to the third academic year; this was to ensure that students have demonstrably attained sufficient learning from their general education, for example, as represented by a minimum grade point average prior to admission into a school of business. Thus, the need exists for a bridge or other construct to span the separation created by the aforementioned curricular structure.