What Kind of Students Go Into Business?

(This article was originally written for "MBA Magazine," a national journal for business students and faculty.)

YOU SEE IT in newspapers, magazines and journals. You see it in articles, interviews, and advertisements. You see it everywhere these days. "Unfortunately, college kids don't even dislike American business--they just ignore it," reads a recent ad in the popular press. Everyone has an opinion about the problem, but no one seems to know just what causes it. Whether through apathy, indifference, or disdain, college students today just don't seem to want to go into business.

Let's take a look through this barrage of panic-ridden oratory and see what facts there are. Why do, or do not, undergraduates at Harvard choose business as a career?

First of all, most students do not think of businessmen as money-hungry capitalists bent on crushing the proletariat. American industry has often served as a convenient scapegoat for the frustrations of campus radicals. But we must not extrapolate from cliches to general feelings of hostility. While radical slogans such as "Dow kills babies," "Boycott Stop and Shop," and "Chase Manhattan advocates white racism" mobilize middle-class sentiment against the Vietnam war, exploitation of the grape workers, and South African apartheid, they are but manifestations of a highly active and vocal minority. The radical cause on campus seeks easy targets, and they are sometimes justified, but to generalize from their criticisms to "all students hate business" is absurd.

Students' Roles

Business has recently launched a huge advertising campaign to convince students that it is, indeed, socially and morally conscious. "Thus it is that General Electric Company stresses its role in the fight against air pollution (it builds filtering systems), that Westinghouse Electric Company tells students and others about its work in running a Job Corps Center, and that Corn Products Company asks for '100 college graduates who realize that hunger is the most urgent problem in the world today,' an article explains. This is necessary, but hardly sufficient. Liberal-minded undergraduates are certainly concerned with the "social conscience" and the need to contribute to society, but when it comes to choosing a career there are far more important, and more personal, facts to be considered. Students are more concerned with their own roles in their careers than with vague generalities about the social conscience of business. No matter how socially responsible business may be, students will not enter it if they are convinced that they will have little personal responsibility.

Further confusing business's image is the problem of semantics. A poll of student attitudes on business might be significantly altered by the choice of words used to describe the business function. A small misunderstanding between business and students might be magnified by an image suggested by a poor choice of words. I have been using the word "business," and even--or especially--this word brings to mind the stereotyped image that the American business community is so worried about. The problem lies in the role of the manager, for that is the name applied to those who engage in the study of business, and it is on this level that most students must make a career choice.

All right, what exactly are the statistics? At Harvard a once downward trend in the numbers of those planning on business as a career and those attending graduate business school has been reversed of late. More students every year are going into business from the "better" colleges. Enrollment in business curricula in this country jumped 15 per cent in 1965. At the same time, the demands for these people are increasing rapidly, and unfilled demand creates the impression of dwindling supply.

What is even more significant is that education at a liberal Eastern college seems to turn students toward business. Over the past four years 50 to 75 per cent more students came out of Harvard intending business as a career than went in. In addition, many more people are going into business than are going into Business School. Last year, of the 176 graduating Harvard seniors who planned business as their eventual career, only 76 entered Business School this fall. Others took jobs immediately or went into the military service, but a significantly large number entered other graduate studies, notably Law and Arts & Sciences, planning business careers when they get out.

Most students don't have a bad impression of business, and more and more are choosing management as a career. The liberal college experience seems to push people in this direction. Then why the uproar? It seems to boil down to the one legitimate gripe that the business community makes. It claims that not enough students choose management as a career, and that it is the brighter students who shun it. Business says it wants the top of the graduating class to join the managerial ranks, and that it is not getting the top.

Statistically, it is the people who do less well in terms of grades and academic standing who go to Business School and follow other roads to a business career. We can understand this partially by nothing that on this campus most students who go into business engage in extra-curricular activities, spend more time on social life, and are less grade-oriented than the academically-oriented students, who tend to be less suited to business careers anyway. This may well be the case in many circumstances, but it is too easy an explanation to wipe out the basic statistical trend.

The reason for the "brighter" students' lack of interest can be found in the college itself. Although the college environment leads more people into business, it seems to prevent its top students from going in that direction. The college has different effects on different people. Dr. Stanley King, director of the Harvard Student Study, a research project on the effects of the undergraduate experience on personality, finds that many students arrive at Harvard with a set of personality characteristics well-suited to business, but are looking forward to a career in one of the more "glamorous" professions: law, medicine, academia. Finding that there are more things to do in the college community than study, these students allow the college to develop their personalities and turn them away from the purely academic life toward the myriad of social and business activities available to undergraduates.

At the same time, research has indicated that the Harvard experience has a definite effect in turning students from a more "idealistic" outlook on life to a more "pragmatic" one. Brainwork is what is needed to be on the top of the Harvard academic ladder, and these "personality suited" students place other values before a life of brainwork. Thus they slide down the Harvard grade ladder and hence the statistical bias. Admission to business school places less emphasis on high grades than admission to law or medical schools.

What about those left at the top of the academic scale, the so-called brighter students, for whom study and intellectual attainment are most important? The college pushes these "top" people away from business by its very structure. "The reward structure of a good liberal arts college tends to lure the best men toward academic or professional careers," says the Atkinson-Stevens report. This is the first reason why "brighter"--more academically and intellectually motivated--students are avoiding business. Harvard places an optimum reward on academic achievement. The reward-incentive structure is one in which you receive quality of grades commensurate with quality of intellectual output. You use your brain, you get a gold star. In its most extreme case, it is scholarship for scholarship's sake. The college supposedly fosters freedom of thought, inventiveness and use of the intellect. Top students spend their time learning to conceptualize, theorize and philosophize.

Is business going to offer this kind of set-up, this kind of a reward-in-centive structure? It seems obvious that the academic student will turn to the more "academic" professions: professor, researcher, scientist, lawyer--professions which involve freedom of intellectual activity. Furthermore, students are under the impression that business does not offer such intellectual freedom. The academically talented say they will be too constrained, too limited by the management level they are on, too limited to the manipulation of the great technocracy; business involves too much application and too little creative thinking. They feel that the role of manager will not give them rewards in line with their intellectual abilities, that they will not be free to invent and discover. In short, business is not, in their opinion, in line with the way the college has taught them to think.

The most important question on this campus seems to be not one about social responsibility or pay, but "will I be able to do something which is a challenge, an intellectual exercise, something creative and useful?" No matter what business offers a man in terms of salary or benefits, if it can't offer him a personal challenge and the freedom of action to accept and master this challenge within the frame-work of his job, he is not going to go into business as a career. If the business community really wishes to attract the best young men from the liberal arts colleges it must begin to pay them in intangibles as well as with money, pension plans, and memberships in the company country club. Able young men must be paid with the intangible currency of responsibility, of freedom, and of the chance to make mistakes. They must be allowed to ask the crucial question of "Why?" as well as the usual one, "How?"

Another reason that the more academically bright students at Harvard shun business is that, as Professor Kenneth Andrews has pointed out, although professional education for managers has progressed considerably, only recently has it been accepted as a legitimate "academic discipline." Graduate education has sky-rocketed in recent years, and has become mandatory for most of the professions. Law, medicine and scholarship all have necessary and accepted disciplines, where the structure and thought of the particular profession are taught. One must study at graduate school for these professions; one must embrace the discipline involved.

In business, this has not always been so. One needed only to go out and join the great free-enterprise system to become a businessman in the past. Even before a student chooses a career, he is concerned with the legitimacy of his graduate studies. Only recently has management become a teachable science, and even more recently an accepted form of academic endeavor. All problems of undergraduate views of business aside, it is then easy to see why the most academically oriented students, questioning the validity of this upstart graduate discipline, turn to the older, more established courses of graduate study. This problem will persist until scholars are convinced that the study of management as a profession has every bit as much intellectual content as the other graduate studies. The skepticism of undergraduates must be transformed into critical appraisal. This change is rapidly occurring as the "management way of thinking" becomes more and more accepted in government and other non-business fields.

Another major factor keeping "top" students, as well as many others, from business is the growing range of alternatives for both graduate study and career choice. The world is growing in complexity at a fantastic rate. The information explosion has been supercharged by the advent of the computer. The need for scholars and academics in all fields of human enterprise has boomed. The alternatives to business, therefore, have become increasingly attractive, especially for the man dominated by intellectual curiosity and possessing high academic ability. Bright college graduates are facing heavy demand from everywhere, not just from business.

A final explanation for undergraduates' lack of enthusiasm is what Professor Joseph Bower, Faculty Coordinator of the Harvard Business School Summer Internship Program this summer, calls the problem of the role of the businessman. This concept seems to encompass both the intellectual and societal hang-ups of undergraduates in regard to business. The role of the doctor or the role of the lawyer are academically and socially defined and accepted. Most undergraduates today neither understand nor accept the concept of the role of the businessman. It has for too long been ambiguous. The role of the professional manager can now be well defined by the graduate business school, but is still quite confusing and undefined to the undergraduate.

The manager is a producer of goods and services. He makes money. But what are the intellectual processes involved in his role? In what way does he function in, and personally contribute to, society? What good does he do, aside from manufacturing widgits and making everyone want a widgits of his own? How does he behave? What is expected of him? Until this concept of role has been better assimilated by undergraduates many will continue to shun business.

So the more academically inclined students are not turned on by business. Is this a problem? Would the most academically and intellectually motivated students be good for business? Or are the best people for business the ones who are going into it now, the less academic students, perhaps as intelligent, but using their intelligence in a problem-solving way? Would the brilliant thinker, the conceptualize, alone, be any good as a manager, or does business really want the man seasoned with other, more pragmatic qualities and goals? I leave this for business to decide, suggesting that the problem is not as bad as it would seem, and go on to maintain a few ways by which more, and maybe even "brighter" undergraduates could be lured into the ranks of professional management.

First of all, business must stop the panic itself. It must not make a crisis out of a problem. Students don't hate it; they're going into the profession more than ever. Robert Galvin, Chairman of the Board of Motorola, made an expensive attempt at bridging the gap last year through a dialogue in campus newspapers across the country. Unfortunately, Galvin made the problem seem much greater than it actually is. What needs to be done is to stop stressing what students think is wrong with business and start emphasizing what is right with business. Business can certainly compete with other occupations in terms of challenge and reward, if it lets students know where these challenges lie and how the rewards are determined. It's important to continue to stress business's social responsibility, bnt even more to let students know how they can fulfill their own responsibilities.

Management is indeed an academic profession. The role of the manager must be stressed in this light. A manager applies the intellectual training he has received in business school to the problems of the distribution of goods and services in much the same way that the lawyer applies his legal training to the problems of the achievement of justice. The room for great personal challenge in the profession of management must be made clear. The role of the manager must be put across in these terms. Finally, the quality of students now in business schools must not be underrated. Class standing and grades are not