Several call for expanded major choices

In recruiting college students to hire for his consulting company, Todd Sargent typically looks to USC or Cal Poly Pomona, not UCLA.

Sargent, a strategy manager at Hitachi Consulting and an alumni representative to the Undergraduate Students Association Council, does recruit on campus, but he said he has to convince his company to take a chance on UCLA because of the lack of students with both theoretical and practical knowledge concerning business.

Sargent is part of a growing number of people calling for preprofessional majors or minors on campus, such as journalism and pre-law. The Academic Affairs Commission submitted a proposal Friday for the development of a business minor to the office of the Acting Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Scott Waugh.

The proposal seeks to form an exploratory committee made up of faculty, administrators and undergraduate students from the Academic Affairs Commission, to craft the curriculum for a business minor, said Academic Affairs commissioner Nat Schuster.

Schuster said the business economics major is not concentrated enough on business to be considered a real business major, and does not have basic business classes such as ethics and real estate.

“We have a lot of business economics students who aren’t interested in economics, but they want to choose the closest thing (to business), and they end up being displeased with their majors,” said Schuster, who has been working on the proposal since spring 2006.

Schuster acknowledges that the creation of the minor may lead to a major in the future.

“I don’t feel the business economics major has prepared me at all,” said Kelly Haddigan, a third-year business economics student. “It’s all economic theory, which is useless if you’re not planning to teach economics.

Haddigan said that after interning at a commercial real estate firm this past quarter, the company told her it was hard to hire UCLA students since they lacked basic skills such as knowing how to draw up business plans.

Sargent said he knows there are other consulting companies that will not recruit at UCLA because they cannot find qualified students. He added that UCLA students need to find strong internships in order to compete for jobs, since they do not have practical knowledge of business.

Kathy Sims, director of the UCLA Career Center, said there was no evidence from the center’s perspective that students were lacking business knowledge. She noted that UCLA students have been recruited by top business firms, such as the “Big Four,” a group of public accountancy firms.

Judith Smith, vice provost for undergraduate education, said she disagrees with having preprofessional majors because UCLA is not a trade school, though she has not said whether she supports the proposed business minor yet.

“We don’t provide what I would call career training. Career training often occurs after college in internships,” she said. “This is different than two-year programs that would allow students to be accredited in, say, nursing.”

Smith said majors are based on disciplines, which she describes as specific bodies of knowledge, such as literature, and do not include preprofessional majors such as pre-law.

But Smith said she had been looking into developing a legal studies minor which would be interdisciplinary, and not a preprofessional major. She added that creating a major or minor would, at best, take two years, and would hinge on faculty involvement.

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