Colleges and the Marketing Curriculum from the Business Man's Standpoint

Abstract

INTERVIEWS with approximately one hundred business men, a large number of professors of marketing, advertising, accounting and other typical courses in the business schools of a number of the leading universities, and a group of students indicate that we have three very definite problems. In the first place, the business men almost without exception have a very critical attitude toward the job that the universities are doing in the way of training students in the business schools. In the second place, the university professor is thoroughly convinced that he is doing the most constructive job possible under the circumstances, and that the average business man does not realize the degree to which he is really being helped by the university. In the third place, the student is completely bewildered on the one hand by the attitude of the professors, and on the other hand by the attitude of the business man. The average student hopes that he can get a good job and earn a maximum income within a relatively short time after he finishes his business training. To achieve this result presupposes that the things that the student has been taught while he is in the university will be a finely balanced combination of theory, basic principles and concepts general to all businesses, and a wide variety of specific applications of all these main theories, concepts and principles to actual cases, not with the thought in mind of training the student to make any given specific application, but simply so that he underst nds something of the range of possible applications of these principles to these practical problems. When you get down to the bottom of the situation, you find there is really no quarrel between the professors and the business men as to what should be accomplished in the preparation of students. The quarrel comes between the executives' conception of what is being accomplished and what the professor, to the best of his ability, is actually doing. The universities have done an inexcusably poor job of making the leaders of American industries familiar with the changes that have taken place in the teaching of business courses generally in the universities in the past decade. The average business man is hardly justified in criticizing the whole university set-up because of his bad experience with university graduates, for just as it is true in business that out of every hundred candidates that a firm may have, there are never more than a half dozen who are exceptionally brilliant, so it is true, that in the average university out of every hundred students there will never be more than a half dozen who turn out to be shining lights either capable of absorbing the practical slants which the professor may give them, or worse, even having any interest in the subject which they are presumably studying. Nearly all of the seniors and graduate students interviewed said that they wished their courses could include more field work and actual case study. The average student has a very hazy idea either as to what he