Colleges are in the cross hairs of a debate over the relative value of a liberal arts education versus a business degree. But Gloria Cordes Larson, the president of Bentley University in Waltham, Mass., says students don't need to choose just one path.
"It's not about pitting lifelong learning skills against professional skills," says Ms. Larson, a former lawyer and economic policy adviser at the state and federal levels, who took the helm at Bentley in 2007. "A college degree should reflect both."
Ms. Larson says liberal arts schools are losing out not because they teach literature and philosophy, but because they're not doing enough to prepare students for the working world.
Bentley President Gloria Cordes Larson says millennials are 'fabulous.' Parker Eshelman/The Wall Street Journal
All of Bentley's 4,200 undergraduates complete a set of general business courses, such as marketing and global strategy, and then select a major in subjects ranging from finance to philosophy. About 20% of business students double-major with a liberal studies program.
Combining business and liberal-arts instruction has paid off. Last year, 81% of Bentley graduates were employed six months out of school—earning a median $50,000 a year—and another 15% were in graduate school.
Ms. Larson, 63 years old, spoke with The Wall Street Journal about why millennials—people born between 1981 and the early 2000s—aren't so bad and how to make humanities majors more businesslike. Edited excerpts:
WSJ: Millennials are criticized for being entitled and unprepared for the workplace. Why are you enthusiastic about the current generation of college students?
Ms. Larson: I think they're fabulous. [They] think about the triple bottom line—people, planet, profit—and that's never been true of a generation. We used to separate civic from professional.
Having said that, I think part of the bad rap is accurate. Millennials have grown up in a society in which all children are perfect, all children get a prize.
WSJ: How do you integrate business and liberal arts instruction?
Ms. Larson: Right now we're looking at four [undergraduate] courses that blend a liberal arts course that's thematically related to a business course. They include Capital Markets and U.S. Foreign Policy Since 1945, [taught by] an amazing historian and a finance [professor]. Another example is Legal and Ethical Environment of Business, and Problems of Philosophy. That's exactly what philosophy is supposed to be about, the gray areas.
WSJ: Since one major goal of a university is to prepare students for careers, how much say do employers get in your curriculum?
Ms. Larson: We work all the time with our corporate partners to get the curriculum right. The first year I was here, EY LLP (formerly Ernst & Young) gave us more than $500,000 to merge accounting and finance for freshmen and sophomores. That's how it's practiced in the real world, and [students need] to think right out of the gate in this integrative way.
[Banco] Santander [SA] gave us $420,000 to send students to study abroad. They want our kids to have that global perspective.
Are we going to do everything a company wants us to do? No. But a lot of times they have really good ideas.
WSJ: Bentley prides itself on teaching ethics and sustainability. How do you make those vague concepts real to students?
Ms. Larson: We promote service learning—you get an extra credit [for work] you're doing for a nonprofit that relates to what you're studying in the classroom.
Also, a number of kids double major in accounting and ethics and social responsibility. I get goose bumps saying that, having been on audit committees in a post-Sarbanes Oxley world. [The 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act addresses corporate accounting standards.]
WSJ: Bentley's adjunct faculty recently voted not to unionize, bucking a trend at some other colleges. Why didn't the Bentley administration support unionization?
Ms. Larson: The adjuncts have filed an appeal [in the wake of the government shutdown]; they're worried not all ballots were counted. That's in the hands of the [National Labor Relations Board].
We have a tightknit culture, and sometimes unions have a way of separating that; you're a part of [the union], not part of the overarching group.
Those who would like to unionize feel like that'll help make [adjunct teaching] a more complete career path; that's particularly true on the liberal arts side, but it's far less true on the business side. We have a number of business adjuncts who work for companies and don't want to be part of a union.
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