WHILE the Commerce School is not perfect, The Cavalier Daily should leave the non sequiturs about the Commerce School on the comics page. As a third-year student in the Commerce School, I was particularly upset to read yesterday's lead editorial, "Book smart." The article commented on a recent study by Asst. Sociology Prof. Josipa Roksa and New York University Prof. Richard Arum that found students studying a liberal arts curriculum showed increased gains in critical thinking and reasoning skills compared to students within other majors. While I have no qualms with the study, I disagree with the method in which it was construed to unfairly criticize the Commerce School curriculum.
I agree that exposure to a liberal arts education benefits students. The idea, however, that the Commerce School needs to "tighten up its curriculum requirements to ensure that students are exposed to a liberal arts perspective" is completely absurd. The Commerce School is one of the few undergraduate business schools in the nation that requires its students to spend two years in the college before being accepted into the business program. Unlike schools such as the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, the Commerce School does not accept students into the business program straight from high school precisely because it wants to give students the opportunity to explore a liberal arts curriculum. As Bloomberg Businessweek magazine noted, "[University] students said the two-year format left them two additional years to explore the school's numerous offerings but made for a tough course load in the junior year."
Maybe my critical thinking skills have been stunted by my time at the Commerce School, but it sounds like the previous quote indicates students face a trade-off when choosing to obtain their commerce degrees at the University. The world does not contain unlimited resources. When high school students come to the University for the commerce program they know they are taking the risk of not being accepted into the business major and are likewise sacrificing two years of business school immersion. Once students enter the program, they begin the third-year Integrated Core Experience, which is likely to be the most challenging academic course load of their scholastic careers. With so many risks, sacrifices and challenges attached to pursing this academic program, why did roughly 15 percent of second-year students in 2010 attempt to gain admittance into the Commerce School? The Commerce School has to offer something that the College and all the other schools at the University do not provide.
I believe what draws students to the Commerce School is precisely the opportunity to develop the real-world critical thinking and reasoning skills that "Book smart" claimed the school inhibited through a lack of required liberal arts classes. While the previous article's misapplication of the study by Roksa and Arum is regrettable, even its use of the statistics within the article fails to imply that the Commerce School education model is anything less than exceptional.
In the article, the managing board details Roksa and Arum's study saying, "The results show that a stunning 45 percent of students 'did not demonstrate any significant improvement in learning' during their first two years of college and that 36 percent remained statistically unimproved at the time of their graduation." Clearly, the number of students that are "statistically unimproved" declines significantly between the second and final year of their University experience. Although numerous factors in this study prohibit using it to derive assumptions about the University, I would like to casually reflect on the biggest change that will have occurred in my academic life between the end of my second year and graduation. Oh yes
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