In an article titled The Default Major: Skating Through B-School, the New York Times describes the shoddiness of most business majors, and then quotes Henry Mintzberg of McGill University.

[A] dogged critic of traditional business programs, [Mintzberg] … says it is a “travesty” to offer vocational fields like finance or marketing to 18-year-olds.

The story goes on to note that “Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.”

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Yet, as Louis Menand points out, “The No. 1 major in America is, in fact, business.”

… [S]tudents majoring in liberal-arts fields — sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities — do better on [a college learning assessment exam], and show greater improvement, than students majoring in non-liberal-arts fields such as business, education and social work, communications, engineering and computer science, and health. There are a number of explanations. Liberal-arts students are more likely to take courses with substantial amounts of reading and writing; they are more likely to attend selective colleges, and institutional selectivity correlates positively with learning; and they are better prepared academically for college, which makes them more likely to improve. The students who score the lowest and improve the least are the business majors.

Sixty per cent of American college students are not liberal-arts majors, though… Twenty-two per cent of bachelor’s degrees are awarded in [business]. Ten per cent are awarded in education, seven per cent in the health professions. More than twice as many degrees are given out every year in parks, recreation, leisure, and fitness studies as in philosophy and religion. Since 1970, the more higher education has expanded, the more the liberal-arts sector has shrunk in proportion to the whole.

One senior accounting major at Radford, who asked not to be named so as not to damage his job prospects, says he goes to class only to take tests or give presentations. “A lot of classes I’ve been exposed to, you just go to class and they do the PowerPoint from the book,” he says. “It just seems kind of pointless to go when (a) you’re probably not going to be paying much attention anyway and (b) it would probably be worth more of your time just to sit with your book and read it.”

We all know the drill, the way students can get through four years of college without doing or learning much of anything. There’s good old PowerPoint in the classroom, of course, keeping them absent forever. Lots of things to say in favor of technology (laptops in class) in this regard.

But there are also certain majors — the ones the big-time athletes get directed toward — that create perfect non-learning conditions. Business, as this New York Times piece suggests, is among the best. Moronic group projects galore, almost no writing required… And, above all, no body of knowledge. What is business? I mean, as an academic subject? What is journalism? If there’s no body of knowledge, there’s nothing to teach. What you teach is a way of doing stuff, a way of being with other people doing that stuff. These are vocational majors, not academic majors.

Henry Mintzberg, a professor at McGill University in Montreal, … is a dogged critic of traditional business programs. He says it is a “travesty” to offer vocational fields like finance or marketing to 18-year-olds.

But they’re getting prepared for the job market!

And what about employers? What do they want?

According to national surveys, they want to hire 22-year-olds who can write coherently, think creatively and analyze quantitative data, and they’re perfectly happy to hire English or biology majors. Most Ivy League universities and elite liberal arts colleges, in fact, don’t even offer undergraduate business majors.

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UD thanks Dirk for the link.

… Henry Mintzberg [scroll down], the head of Tel Aviv University’s undergraduate business program has urged students not to major in business.

“Study of academic disciplines prepares students to think scientifically in these fields and form the foundation for advanced studies in graduate degree programs,” he said.

One student is outraged:

“Too bad he doesn’t have the integrity not to head a department he doesn’t believe in.”

Do you have to insist on majors in order to believe in your department? UD says no. UD says it shows integrity to care about the quality of undergraduate education your business… minors?… are getting and steer them toward actual academic fields. (Wee UD herself found that the hard-bitten vocationalism of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism was not enough to keep the mind alive, and quickly transferred to the English department.)

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Meanwhile, on the business ethics front, a New York judge has sentenced an insider trading to lecturing.

“To the extent possible, Mr. Fortuna can speak at his college and school of business and other institutions about his own situation and how [easy] it is for him and others to have committed this crime and the difficulties he’s encountered as a result,” [Sidney] Stein said yesterday as he imposed the sentence.

UD foresees an entire industry of MOOCs arising out of the synergy between large numbers of incarcerated insider traders and the need for business schools to deal with their profession’s, er, ethics problems. The general title for these MOOCs would be INSIDER GATING, with subtitles specific to each incarceree’s case.