BBA core course requirements

This post was inspired by a comment posted by student in response to my posting "Grades, college, & life":

i agree entirely with what you say, but how representational is that attitude with the current BBA program? We are required to take 13 courses in the business school, and truly only allowed to elect around 5 or 6 of our own. if we are being required to study material that we are not interested in because of these CORE requirements...doesn't grades become the only motivation?

What an amazingly interesting and useful comment! I happen to completely disagree with it but it's something that I can respond to and recognize as coming from a BBA.

Here's an (extended) excerpt from an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education titled "Has Harvard lost its way?" (by Harry R. Lewis, March 24, 2006). Professor Lewis is a professor at Harvard and previously served as dean of Harvard College. In this piece he is speaking of Harvard but he could just as easily (for my purposes) be speaking of Michigan:

[Harvard] headed toward the conclusion that its students are free agents and for the most part should study what they wish. ... Undergraduate education defined [as Harvard currently defines it] allows professors to do as they wish as well. In an effort to persuade me that I should back the newly proposed, requirement-light curriculum, one professor offered that it meant we faculty members would no longer have to teach students who did not want to take our courses. But the courses from which students learn the most are often the ones they would be disinclined to take without being pressed to do so. The general-education courses I took on Western philosophy stretched and rewarded me, and the core course I teach on information technology and society plays that role for my students. If professors can define their job as teaching what they wish to those who wish to be taught it, Harvard will not carry the centuries-old ideal of a liberal education forward into the next generation. It will instead indulge students' inclinations to learn more of what they know already, while avoiding unpleasant but enlightening disagreements among professors about the relative importance of different studies. Liberal education will be reduced to an easy compromise among academics rather than a long-term commitment to the welfare of students and the society they will serve.

This states my worries about the direction that undergraduate education is going quite well. But here's the essence of it for me: A great university in its undergraduate liberal arts education 1) should help students to (as Dr. Lewis states) "understand the complexities of the human condition" and 2) "challenges its students to ask questions that are both disturbing and deeply important." An undergraduate business education should provide its students with a broad understanding of business in the context of providing a liberal arts education.

When I taught my database and Web site development class (BIT320), it was actually a philosophy class operating under the disguise of a technology class. I wanted to help students think about the world in an entirely different way, one that was not accessible to them before they took the class. I certainly enjoyed teaching this to students electing to take the class. However, the class I most enjoyed teaching was BIT301 — a required introduction to computing for the whole BBA class. This class required me (and my students) to get our heads around a vast array of topics, and required me to figure out how to present these topics in a manner that was accessible though still challenging to students with a wide set of differing backgrounds. In turn, it required students to confront topics that did not immediately appeal to them but that would, to a great extent, be extremely helpful to them as they began their independent lives and careers.

Let me now react more directly to Steve's comments.

First, as he correctly states, the current BBA curriculum requires that you take many courses, leaving little room for electives. Yes, and we consider this a feature, not a bug, of the current curriculum (to borrow a phrase from my IT background). The "we" in the previous sentence refers to the faculty, alumni, the School's boards, and recruiters. The Ross School is not a school of finance, or a school of marketing — it is a school of business. We provide a general business education in the context of a liberal arts education. If a student wants a specialized education in some facet of business, then he or she should get an MBA with a specialization in that particular area of study; that's what a masters is for.

Second, implicit in this comment is the belief that studying something that is required cannot be (or, at least, frequently is not) enjoyed. Well, that's too bad. It does not have to be that way. This is something that is entirely under your control. Do what you can to make every course a positive learning experience. Learn to enjoy the analysis done in business economics, the detailed specifications created in a BIT course, the complexity of the human condition in M&O. These are all completely different, but each are enjoyable in their own way. Try to figure out how to mine each class for its particular gold.