Changes at the Source

Plagued by a continuing shortage of executives, U.S. business depends as never before on the output of the nation's business schools--and cares more than ever about the kind of training they provide. Fully one-third of the companies that recruit college graduates do so exclusively from students in the 600 U.S. business schools, which now account for 20% of all graduate and undergraduate enrollment. Last week at their annual meeting in Manhattan, the deans of the leading schools--the 113 accredited by the American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business--agreed that business schools are changing rapidly in response to new pressures.

"We're no longer training students for their first jobs," says Dean Courtney Brown of Columbia's business school. "We're trying to develop business minds with adaptability, perception and conviction." Even Harvard business school, the most prestigious of them all, has overhauled its whole curriculum, and next month will graduate the first class taught under the new scheme. Many businessmen agree that a noticeable change has occurred. William B. Murphy, president of Campbell Soup and this year's chief of the Business Council, speaks for many when he contends that "both the quality of the training and the graduates rises every year."

The shift is partly the result of criticism--from inside the schools and from such groups as the Ford Foundation, the Carnegie Corp. and the Committee for Economic Development--aimed at low-caliber students, inadequate facilities and excessive focus on narrow vocational training. It has also been speeded by rapid changes in the business world, which has been made vastly more complex, innovation-minded and psychology-conscious by the onrush of technology. "We can never win a race to educate for the latest thing," Carnegie Corp. President John W. Gardner told the deans last week. "Knowledge and skill that is avant-garde when a student is in college may be hopelessly outdated a decade later." Not even the textbooks, in fact, can keep up. "We have found," says Clifford Clark, associate dean of New York University's business school, "that procedures, in things like stock market analysis were becoming obsolete by the time they were being taught."

Some major changes: > Courses are becoming less specialized, more intellectual and analytical. "Our function," says Dean Bernard F. Landuyt of Detroit University's college of commerce, "is to train business leaders, not clerks." When Robert R. Dockson became dean of the University of Southern California's school of business administration five years ago, he revamped its content from top to bottom, adding to the faculty experts in sociology, philosophy, political science and physics. Says he: "I cut out all the Mickey Mouse courses that were purely descriptive."

> More math and statistics are required almost everywhere--the colleges' big response to computers. M.I.T. requires applicants for its master's degree in industrial management to have college calculus before they start. Carnegie Tech students not only learn how to program computers but practice using them to solve business problems; less technical universities, such as Chicago, teach what computers can do.

> The growing global flavor of U.S. business is putting a new stress on knowing the ways of international business. Stanford, Harvard, Alabama and De Paul have all set up international programs. Chicago will start one this fall in which students will take their second year at the London School of Economics or the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium.

>Teaching techniques are being sharpened and shifted. Harvard (which recently admitted women business students on an equal basis with men) plans to spend $500,000 to update and increase its 27,000 case studies of actual company problems. Such schools as U.S.C. and U.C.L.A. now emphasize the virtues of diplomacy, good manners and interdependence in business. Among the teaching aids: a course in which good students are teamed with poor ones and graded in pairs. U.C.L.A. and a few other schools have also decided to shut down their undergraduate business schools altogether and concentrate on graduate training, figuring that tomorrow's business leaders will be better off with a broad liberal arts or engineering background before they begin to specialize.

> More businessmen are going back to school to teach. Nearly 15% of Detroit University's business faculty are returnees from business. Chairman John Barr will soon leave Montgomery Ward to become dean of Northwestern's business school. A substantial number of executives now teach part time or temporarily. Former General Counsel Leland Hazard of Pittsburgh Plate Glass Co. gives a culture course at Carnegie Tech, and Ford Financial Vice President Theodore Yntema will lead seminars there this fall. Paul M. Mazur, a Lehman Bros. partner, is a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.

Search for Largesse. One big spur to such changes has been the $35 million that the Ford Foundation has poured into grants for research, restudy of curriculums and doctorate fellowships since 1953. Now that the foundation is phasing out this largesse, the schools hope that business will take up the burden. Today, business colleges get less than 2% of what cash-rich corporations and foundations give to education. One promising sign: more companies are sending their executives back to business school, where, among other things, they can discover for themselves what the campus can contribute to the commercial community.

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