Anne Colby, Consulting Professor at Stanford University, former Senior Scholar, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
William M. Sullivan, Senior Scholar at the Center of Inquiry in the Liberal Arts, Wabash College, former Senior Scholar, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching

Business is the most popular undergraduate major in U.S. higher education. The panelists argue that business education can be strengthened by supporting key elements of liberal learning integrated with business disciplines. They believe that this integration will help students acquire tools for advancing their business careers and also help students understand the place of business in larger institutional contexts, think creatively, and develop wise, ethically grounded professional judgment.

During the broadcast, the presenters:

Articulated their conception of liberal learning
Explained why liberal learning is essential for a comprehensive business education
Provided examples of effective curricula that integrate liberal and business learning
Outlined recommendations that will help business students move beyond technical expertise to deeper and more creative understanding of their chosen field, the broader world in which it operates, and the significance of these for their own life choices and directions

This webinar drew from a new Carnegie/Jossey-Bass book, Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession, by Colby, Sullivan, Thomas Ehrlich and Jonathan R. Dolle with a foreword by Lee S. Shulman.

WEBINAR RESOURCES

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Analyses of variance performed on surveys of 481 students conducted at the beginning and end of courses and programs show that educational interventions with a focus on political engagement can significantly boost many dimensions of democratic participation, including expectations for future political activity. On average, all students participating in the twenty-one interventions increased their political knowledge and skills. Other effects of courses and programs differed for students who began their programs with higher versus lower levels of political interest. For the group with lower initial interest, the interventions significantly increased students’ sense of identity as politically engaged persons and their expectations for participating in a range of political activities, with small to medium effect sizes (Cohen’s d = .24-.66). The group with higher initial interest experienced smaller but significant gains in understanding and skills (d = .12-.19). The results support understanding political engagement as a multidimensional set of inclinations, competencies, and behaviors. The results from this research also provide evidence that well-designed courses and programs can effectively promote these four key dimensions of political engagement in a diverse range of undergraduates without significantly changing students’ party identifications or their positions on a liberal-conservative continuum.

Initial surveys conducted for the Core Commitments initiative have shown strong consensus among faculty, administrators, and students that these five aspects of personal and social responsibility are important goals of a college education. Unfortunately, however, many fewer respondents say that their institution is working toward these goals in an effective way. Why are so few institutions working to achieve these outcomes if so many acknowledge their importance? A likely explanation is that, despite evidence to the contrary, many educators hope and expect that these outcomes will be achieved as by-products of a college education, that they do not require explicit attention.

The relative lack of institutional investment in students’ personal and social responsibility reflects the widespread assumption that academic content knowledge and the intellectual skill of analytic or critical thinking, quite divorced from either action or responsibility, are the overriding aims of higher education and that the development of personal and social responsibility is only distantly connected with those aims. In what follows, we take issue with both of these assumptions, arguing that colleges should aim to teach students how to use knowledge and criticism not only as ends in themselves but also as means toward responsible engagement with the life of their times. We also argue that this can be accomplished best by addressing some core developmental dimensions or processes that underlie and tie together the various elements of personal and social responsibility articulated by the Core Commitments initiative.