Content written by Richard Vedder and published by Forbes
MBA News Digest Comment: A thought provoking article.
Extracted Content: A thoughtful young professorial colleague of mine bitterly denounced business schools in a conversation with me last week, suggesting that they promote a vocational orientation to college that is excessive and unhealthy. Colleges, when they evolved in colonial America, were designed to promote virtue, religion and morality, and later that evolved to include a sense of civic consciousness–an obligation to serve one’s fellow citizens admirably. Others have looked at colleges as a device designed to realize the American Dream, promoting inter-generational income mobility. Among some today, these non-vocational purposes of higher education still resonate. Nonetheless, new college students routinely state that the primary purpose of college is getting a job, so not surprisingly one of the modern trends is the rise in the importance of majors in business-related areas at the expense of majors in the humanities and some social sciences.