Ms. Korn notes that despite the fact that 20% of students major in business, “faculty members, school administrators and corporate recruiters are questioning the value of a business degree at the undergraduate level.”

What is the major criticism of the business major? Says Ms. Korn: “The undergraduate degrees focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and don’t develop enough critical thinking and problem-solving skills . . . .  Companies say they need flexible thinkers with innovative ideas and a broad knowledge base derived from exposure to multiple disciplines. And while most recruiters don’t outright avoid business majors, companies in consulting, technology and even finance say they’re looking for candidates with a broader academic background.”

And what are colleges and universities doing to correct the problem?  Based on Ms. Korn’s examples, they are trying to add some humanities and social sciences content to the business courses. George Washington University’s School of Business, for example, “is planning to draw on expertise in the university’s psychology and philosophy departments to teach business ethics” and it plans “to introduce [a] new curriculum, which will also include a core course on business and society, in the fall.”

While I would not argue against adding such material to the curriculum, I am fairly confident this approach will not solve the problem. Critical thinking, problem-solving, flexibility of thought and innovation are not acquired by the addition of a unit to a course or even a whole course. These skills come from the full experience of a broad curriculum. Ironically, most business majors are already required to take a broad array of courses beyond their major to graduate.

Based on the James S. Kemper Foundation’s experience with the Kemper Scholars Program, I think the solution will come from three things:

• Corporate leaders, business faculty, and the culture generally sending the message loud and clear that a broad liberal arts education is the best preparation for leadership in organizations; (Wait, that’s the philosophy statement of the James S. Kemper Foundation!)
• Insisting that students have a mentored experience in the professional world through jobs or internships while they are still in school; and
• Teaching students how to be reflective about the ways their academic education is proving useful in the kinds of tasks they are asked to do in the professional environment.

A recent nationwide survey conducted by Global Strategy Group shows that business executives think that new college graduates excel in technology but are weak in areas like solving problems and communicating.

When asked what skills they most desired in new college graduates, employers ranked abilities such as problem solving, collaboration, critical thinking and written communication skills at the top of the list. When asked about new grads’ skills in these areas, employers generally felt new grads’ failed to meet expectations.

This is a tremendous opportunity for liberal arts students to shine in the work force. Liberal arts students excel in the skills employers value most. Combining an academic background in the liberal arts with one or more internships where a student can demonstrate the skills employers are looking for, and at the same time deliver tangible results on one or more intern projects is the very best preparation to launch a career in management.

They note, for example, that “gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills (i.e., general collegiate skills) are either exceedingly small or empirically non-existent for a large proportion of students.”  These student skills were evaluated by the College Learning Assessment or CLA, a test developed by the Council for Aid to Education to assess the outcomes of a college education.

The results demonstrate that not all students, even at the same college, are the same. According to Arum and Roksa, students “majoring in traditional liberal-arts fields . . . demonstrated significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study. Students majoring in business, education, social work, and communications had the lowest measurable gains.”

A report following up on Academically Adrift by the same authors with Jeannie Kim from New York University was released in late January, 2012. You can read the full report, titled “Documenting Uncertain Times: Postgraduate Transitions of the Academically Adrift Cohort,” online by clicking here.

The new report seeks to show what happens to the students who were most adrift when they get into the job market. This report shows a correlation between students’ success in acquiring the college skills that we might call “liberal arts skills” and their success in transitioning to adulthood.

Students who scored in the bottom 20% of students taking the CLA were three times as likely as those in the top 20% to be unemployed, twice as likely to be living at home with parents, and much more likely to have credit card debt.

In many ways, “Documenting Uncertain Times” gives research evidence to support the James S. Kemper Foundation’s underlying assertion that “a college-level education in the liberal arts complemented by workplace experiential education represents the ideal preparation for life and work.”

I want to be on record that I think colleges cost too much – not necessarily too much for what students get access to, but more than getting a good education needs to cost. The consumers – students and their parents – could do their part to lower costs by recognizing that things like state-of-the-art exercise facilities, plush residence halls, and on-campus mental health professionals add to their overall cost and by deciding these are not the elements on which to compare colleges.

Indebtedness is, of course, related directly to cost. But consumers do have some controls over what they borrow, including the relative expense of the college they choose and whether they borrow only the minimum amount they need. There is no convincing evidence that an education at an Ivy League campus adds enough to one’s success to make it worth the difference in cost from a good but less highly regarded school.

Yet to me the most egregiously irrelevant arguments about the worth of college relate to the choice of major. Indeed, in the current bad economy, many graduates are working at jobs superficially unrelated to their college major. Someone even felt the need to invent the word “mal-employed” for this situation.

Anyone who knows anything about the history of professional work in the United States can explain that this situation of doing a job unrelated to your major is not new. It hasn’t been more than two or three decades since most college graduates majored in the humanities and social sciences. And how many of those history majors ended up doing history for a career? How many philosophy majors found careers in philosophy?

Research into the backgrounds of corporate CEOs reveals that a large majority of them majored in areas outside business, economics and management. The true value of their education was much more than their major.

It is a real head-scratcher to read the same columnists who talk about the rapid and continuous change in our culture also arguing for narrow specialized education for jobs that may be gone tomorrow.

Don’t let these writers scare you into stupid choices about your education. There are many academic routes to gaining the kinds of skills that are needed in the work world.

Elise Beckman (2013) of Lake Forest College and Megan Slavish (2014) of Beloit College are both enrolled in a program focused on globalization, the environment and development at the University of Botswana in southern Africa.

The program is sponsored by the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM) to which Lake Forest College and Beloit College both belong. Elise and Megan are studying with fourteen students in the Botswana program this semester.

Both are taking a Setswana language course and a course which studies the demographics of AIDS/HIV within Botswana. Each will also be conducting research on a topic of their choice. Elise, for example, will be researching the impact of socioeconomic backgrounds on university students’ perceptions of contraception and the prevalence of AIDS/HIV within Botswana.

This program includes travel throughout Botswana and South Africa, including trips to Johannesburg, Maun, the Okavengo Delta, Victoria Falls, and the Jwaneng Diamond Mine. In addition, they will both be interning or volunteering at a non-profit organization within Gaborone. Megan is still in the process of confirming her internship, and Elise will be volunteering at the Baylor Children’s AIDS/HIV Clinic.

“Studying abroad in Botswana has already been one of the most rewarding and insightful experiences of my life,” said Megan.  “It has challenged me to evaluate my patterns of behavior and my perceptions of people and places.  While there certainly have been struggles during my time here, I have truly enjoyed participating in a new culture, meeting new people, and exploring new places. This experience will help me appreciate not only the wonderful Botswana culture but my own culture as well.”

Echoing Megan, Elise noted that “Being in Botswana has opened my eyes to the importance of self exploration and discovery as an undergraduate. This experience is forcing me outside of my comfort zone and allowing me the opportunity to explore a very different part of the world. I am thrilled to have the option to study African history, politics, and economics while actually living in an African nation. I look forward to returning to the United States with a different perspective on world politics and the importance of travel.”

One interesting aspect of the Associated Colleges of Illinois is that the Board of Directors is made up of both college presidents and business leaders.  As a result, we can quickly spot trends in the worlds of higher education and business.  As we finish 2011, I’ve noticed some trends around hiring new college graduates emerge that I’d like to share with you—and these trends are good news for liberal arts students!

Trends in hiring new college graduates:

• ·        Recruiters are willing to look across a variety of academic majors to find a god “fit” for their companies. 

• ·        Employers are looking for a flexibility. Increasingly, adaptability and being able to manage change are important qualities that recruiters are looking for.

• ·        Along with a broad-based liberal arts background, internships in which students have built skills in internet and marketing functions are highly valued by employers.

• ·        Employers continue to value entrepreneurial talents and creativity. Projects and internships that demonstrate these qualities are highly prized.

• ·        Employers continue to hire from the intern pool demonstrating the importance of internship  experiences.

All of these current trends underscore the long-held beliefs of the James S. Kemper Foundation that a college-level education in the liberal arts complemented by workplace experiential education represents the ideal preparation for life and work, especially for careers in administration and business.

        I find their most interesting conclusions to be those concerning “magical thinking.” The authors hypothesize that people project charisma and vision on leaders for whose successes they cannot see the “mechanical causes, such as long hours and hard-won skills.”

        These conclusions provide a helpful caveat for those who aspire to careers in organizational management and leadership: it is a mistake to think that leadership is some innate personality trait rather than something gained through applying one’s talents in experience, practice, attentiveness, and reflection.  Leaders are more made than born, even if people generally do not understand that.

      Conclusions in this article can be seen as reinforcing the legitimacy of points made by Malcolm Gladwell.  A common theme that appears throughout his 2008 book Outliers is the “10,000-Hour Rule,” a concept based on a study by Anders Ericsson. Gladwell argues that there are a great many variables that explain extraordinary success, but a very important variable is the inordinate amount of time and energy successful people put into gaining expertise through practice.  For example, he anecdotally illustrates his point with reference to assertions that the Beatles put in 10,000 hours of playing in Hamburg before they started playing in Britain and became an “overnight success.”

      So no matter what the average person may assume about the magical abilities of successful leaders, the most reliable way to become one is to work very hard at developing your skills and at doing your job.

A guest blog by Jerry Fuller, Executive Director of Associated Colleges of Illinois

Many liberal arts students I talk with are concerned about what they can offer employers in today’s challenging job market.

I tell them that they have much to offer.  Certainly they have the critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration, and communication skills that have always been the hallmarks of a liberal arts education.

In addition, liberal arts students can offer:

• Technology skills, such as their online network that companies can leverage for crowd sourcing; social media knowledge to design Facebook fan pages, and skills at posting YouTube videos;

• Good grades that demonstrate diligence, intelligence and work ethic—all key traits employers are looking for, especially in new hires;

• Enthusiasm.  All entry level employees need training, but by demonstrating a sincere enthusiasm, people will want to train, mentor, and promote you; and

• Experience.  The most desirable trait any student can put on their resume is a set of professional skills acquired through internship experiences. Internships are invaluable for making the transition from the academic world and launching a career.  Ideally, students can have internship experiences the summers before their junior and senior years. But the important thing is to start now—wherever  you are in you college career, get to work with the help of your college’s career center to set up one or more internships.

It’s not so much what one studies that makes career success, but how you can bring to bear the process of assimilating and analyzing information, and then utilizing that analysis to solve real world problems that makes all the difference.

       In an editorial titled “On Liberal Education and the Insurance Business” which he wrote for Insurance magazine in 1965, Ambassador Kemper recommended that top managers should read Franklin’s autobiography.  Later he argued “Since liberal education must be a continuous process, companies must provide a climate where liberal education can flourish, company programs must not solely be concerned with training in particular aspects of the business. Training is necessary but not enough. Training makes employees experts in answering questions. Education helps employees to determine what questions should be asked.”

       That observation warms the heart of this former liberal arts college dean, for it undermines the notion held by many that a liberal arts education is not a good preparation for the workplace.  The quotation also helps explain why the mission of the James S. Kemper Foundation is built upon the belief “that a college-level education in the liberal arts complemented by workplace experiential education represents the ideal preparation for life and work, especially for careers in administration and business.”

       Ambassador Kemper’s commitment to Benjamin Franklin’s model of lifelong learning and to liberal arts education came to my mind again after I read an October 29, 2011 essay in the New York Times by Walter Isaacson, the biographer of Apple founder Steve Jobs. [You can read Isaacson's NYT essay here.]

       Under the headline “The Genius of Jobs,” Isaacson’s essay seeks to answer the question of whether Steve Jobs was “very, very smart” or a genius. After comparing Steve Jobs’s mind to Bill Gates’s and Einstein’s, Isaacson concludes that Jobs was different from Gates and not at the same level of genius as Einstein. He concludes “Bill Gates is super-smart, but Steve Jobs was super-ingenious. The primary distinction, I think, is the ability to apply creativity and aesthetic sensibilities to a challenge.”

       “In the world of invention and innovation,” continues Isaacson, “that means combining an appreciation of the humanities with an understanding of science — connecting artistry to technology, poetry to processors. This was Mr. Jobs’s specialty. ‘I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,’ he said.”

        Indeed many have commented on Jobs’s ability to blend technological inventiveness and aesthetic sensibility to create aesthetically appealing products that work well and do very useful things.  As Benjamin Franklin and James S. Kemper knew, poetry and humanities are inseparable parts of ingenuity; and ingenuity is a critical part of being an excellent leader.

       Isaacson’s article concludes “America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences.” And creating such people is the mission of the James S. Kemper Foundation and the liberal arts colleges with whom we collaborate.

      Now in a piece at the Mashable website, Erica Swallow has reported on a study by the social media monitoring service Reppler which surveyed over 300 “hiring professionals” to determine how much they  consult social media to research applicants.  The short answer: a lot.    

      I would like to say I am really Gen Y hip about social media and discovered this on my own. (I’ll bet “hip” is not a word hip people even use these days.) The fact is, my friend Jerry Fuller, executive director of the Associated Colleges of Illinois, reader of the Kemper Foundation blog, and occasional contributor sent me the link.  But, hey, it still shows I was ahead of the curve on this issue.

     The original article is worth taking a look at. [You can click here to read Erica Swallow’s original post.] It is pretty stunning to see that 91% of respondents said they “use social media sites to screen prospective employees” and that nearly 70% have used what they read to reject a candidate and nearly 70% have used what they read to hire a candidate. The survey even shows you the kinds of information to which they paid attention.

      I think one of the key words in the report is “screen.” That suggests that those who have been rejected will probably never know why and will not get the chance to correct any impressions in an interview or correspondence.

      Once again I would recommend that college students carefully review their online presence and get a few pairs of more objective eyes than your own to help. And, rather than repeat them, I suggest you consult my earlier posts with ideas about how to create a more helpful web image of yourself. You can read To Market, to Market by clicking here.  You can read To Market, to Market Part II by clicking here.