A difficult subject must be now be addressed. Even though the nearly infinite mix of majors, minors and specialties contribute uniquely to the capacity of each individual graduate, each will inevitably serve in an organization of some type. [There may be the odd starving artist in the garrett somewhere, but there may be a good reason that artist is starving...]
My children are sick of sentences from me that being with, “if you had taken Business 101 you would understand _________.”
Sorry to dredge up this old argument. But being strictly honest, very few curricula actually emerge from a vision of the contributing and performing graduate ten or twenty years out, [or sometimes even a month out]. I once suggested to a search committee that the mission of every college should be producing happy alums. Simplistic, but it’s a useful umbrella for thinking about all the things that lead up to an alum being happy… a satisfying job, balanced family life, enduring community, an intellectual toolkit, a commitment to lifelong learning and so on. Some colleges aim to deliver on these things.
Outcomes assessment is gathering steam, but which outcomes? Sometimes this more recent development in accreditation and strategic planning dwells more on the process and not the results.
Some words from the Peter Drucker:
Most, if not all, educated people will practice their knowledge as members of an organization. The educated person will therefore have to prepare to live and work simultaneously in two cultures, that of the intellectual, the specialist who focuses on words and ideas, and that of the manager, who focuses on people and work. Intellectuals need their organization as a tool; it enables them to practice their techne, their specialized knowledge. Managers see knowledge as a means to the end of organizational performance. Both are right. They are poles rather than contradictions. Indeed, they need each other. The intellectual’s world, unless counterbalanced by the manager, becomes one in which everybody “does his own thing” but nobody does anything. The manager’s world becomes bureaucratic and stultifying without the offsetting influence of the intellectual. Many people in the postcapitalist society will actually live and work in these two cultures at the same time. And many more could and should be exposed to both by rotation early in their career–by having the young computer technician, for example, serve as a project manager and team leader. All educated persons in the postcapitalist society will have to be prepared to understand both cultures. [i]
If a changing paradigm of the “educated person” is evolving, then college or university graduates need to be able to thrive in two cultures – that of the intellectual and of the manager. The two cultures – intellectual and manager – coexist, and yet most education deals only with the former. Conversely, those who remain – business majors – often graduate with extensive attention paid to the latter, and with less exposure to the former. It’s no wonder that the business department often makes for a strange bedfellow in some liberal arts colleges. The implication, (and yes, this is coming from a teacher of management who is also an historian), is that the intellectual culture may be taught very well, but the culture of the manager is not. Most institutions simply ignore this, leaving it to the individual employer to pick up the pieces when the graduate shows up for work. [See Top 40 recommendations...]
Of course there are only so many years a student should and can remain in an undergraduate program. If we dropped every course into a program that sounded cool, the grad might escape ten years later. On the other hand, some universities are talking about three-year bachelor’s degrees, instead of four. [Cambridge and Oxford have already been doing this for 800 or so years.] At some point this graduate needs a job, but employers want more organizational savvy in the applicant and jobs these days are hard to find. We know of some parents who are starting their own nonprofits just to employ their unemployable children.
Maybe everyone shouldn’t be a business major, but why should not the culture of the manager be taught to every graduate who expects to work in an organization? [read all graduates]
One solution could be a gap-year master’s degree with hard-core volunteer work that both introduced graduates to organizations and built rèsumès. In volunteering the student could garner a legitimate job title or two that translated into experience while absorbing the culture of the manager. Certainly it is one more year of education but with an additional credential and some organizational competence an employer might find more interesting.
[i] P. Drucker. (1993). The rise of the knowledge society. Wilson Quarterly, 17(2), 52.
About Wes Balda