College of Business sees major changes

The J. Whitney Bunting College of Business has made some slight changes to the programs they provide: no longer offering the general business major or the business communication minor.

The faculty of the College of Business voted last April to deactivate the general business major and the business communication minor, according to Matthew Liao-Troth, Dean of the College of Business.

“What we found was that students were using general business interchangeably with business undecided, and by senior year had changed to a major in a business discipline,” Liao-Troth said. “With the business communication minor we found that no one was actually taking the minor, but in offering the advanced BComm classes we were limiting the number of sections of the required BComm classes, which was creating a bottleneck for all business students.”

Dr. Dale Young, Associate Dean of the College of Business, also explained that large numbers of students chose the general business major, but very few actually completed it.

“Students were transferring out to other areas, the two most popular being marketing and management,” Young said.

“Those who wanted a truly flexible degree have found that the Management major offers more degrees of freedom than the general business major,” Lio-Troth said.

“For the business communication minor, we were finding that enrollments didn’t match up with graduation rates,” Young said. “Graduation rates were extremely low. Over a five year period from 2005 to 2010, only 10 students graduated with the minor. We couldn’t justify placing resources into a minor that nobody was completing.”

The College of Business stopped accepting students for the general business major last Summer, but students already involved in the major will be able to complete the program. The business communication minor was discontinued last Fall.

Some students in the business school support the discontinuation of the general business major, like senior management information systems major Cooper Latham.

“Probably 15 percent of the students in the school of business have chosen the general business major. It’s certainly not a program that attracts people,” Latham said. “I truly feel like it’s a fallback option for people who can’t decide what they want. Studying a more specific topic is to their benefit.”

Jake Ottoson, a sophomore business management major, also supports the deactivation of the general business major.

“I think it would be better to make people specialize in more specific business branches like marketing, finance, management, economics, etc,” Ottoson said.

Young thinks these changes will improve the level of services that the College of Business can offer because they will be able to make better use of available resources.

Posted by Caitlin Renn on Mar 3 2011. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.