Blog Archive In Other News Business Schools Offer Liberal Arts Courses

Blog Archive In Other News… Business Schools Offer Liberal Arts Courses The business school world is constantly buzzing with change and innovation. Each week, in addition to our regular news posts, we briefly touch on a few notable stories from this dynamic field in one roundup. Here is what caught our eye this week: The issue of income inequality worries many, and reportedly Harvard Business School (HBS) graduates are no exception. The 2015 Survey on U.S. Competitiveness polled approximately 2,700 HBS alumni, and an analysis of the results conducted by Harvard professors reveals respondents’ bleak expectations regarding rising income disparities. When asked to predict the distribution of future income levels, participants guessed that 41% of income gains would belong to the richest 1% of the population and only 5% of gains would be realized by the poorest 20%. “Respondents remain pessimistic on balance about the likelihood that firms will lift American living standards by paying higher wages and benefits in the near term,” the professors’ report states, according to Fortune. “Shared prosperity is not around the corner.” Business school undergraduate programs are widening their horizons with regard to liberal arts, according to U.S. News World Report. Such schools as the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and the Stern School of Business at New York University recently have begun to offer liberal arts courses  to  undergraduate students. At Stern, for example, students are allowed to take half of their courses at NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences. In addition to providing a more well-rounded education, Ross Dean Alison Davis-Blake believes the mixture of liberal arts and business studies could score points for students at home: “Parents are often caught between wanting their children to have a broad-based education that will expand their minds and vision, and having a narrow technical education that will help them get a job,” she commented in the article. While many business schools are raising tuition costs annually, the Simon Business School at the University of Rochester is doing exactly the opposite: the school will cut the tuition of its full-time, two-year program in the fall of 2016 by nearly 14%, bringing the total to $92,000 from the current $106,440. “We [the top-ranked business schools] have all gotten into this habit of upping our prices 3% to 5% a year and then separately being worried about attracting the best students,” Dean Andrew Ainslie told Fortune. Ainslie hopes the tuition cut will bring in a larger applicant pool, stating: “We believe that prospective students often overlook Simon due to our sticker price despite our strengths in academics, student quality, and career placement.” Share ThisTweet Harvard University (Harvard Business School) New York University (Stern) News University of Michigan (Ross)