Business Schools Embrace the Liberal Arts

Undergraduate business programs are, for the most part, no-nonsense degrees. You have your finance, your marketing, and your management—and the connection between what is taught in the classroom and the skills used on the job is pretty straightforward. But a number of business schools are beginning to experiment with something that might have been considered sacrilege a few years ago: incorporating the liberal arts—literature, history, science, and philosophy—into the business curriculum.

The move marks a growing sense that something critical is missing from college business education, something that can’t be easily remedied by a new class or other quick fix. The goal: to create business programs that produce graduates with knowledge of the world that is both broad and deep, and with the complex reasoning, problem solving, and communication skills they’ll need to perform their best at work.