The Daily Pennsylvanian :: Colin Kavanaugh | Opening up the gates to the ivory tower

In a recent set of undergraduate business school rankings from Business Week, the Wharton School was ranked third behind the University of Virginia and the University of Notre Dame business schools, respectively. This was quite a shocker to a school full of students accustomed to ranking dominance in their undergraduate division.

So, what happened to our famed business school? Was Wharton's superiority just another Wall Street bubble or a mistaken ranking based on misguided calculations?

"Rankings are a snapshot in time geared to answering specific questions," explained Georgette Phillips, vice dean of the Wharton Undergraduate Division, in a Daily Pennsylvanian article from last March. "Some questions are quantitative, others are qualitative."

With this in mind, I took a deeper look at the McIntire School of Commerce at UVA, the No. 1 ranked undergraduate business school in the country, according to the magazine.

Interestingly, McIntire offers a unique opportunity to understand what might be a weakness of Wharton's. When admitting applicants to UVA, students are not immediately separated into various schools as they are at Penn. Engineering, College, Nursing, Wharton? Forget it. Students are admitted to the University en masse.

During UVA students' first two years at the university, they take classes across the spectrum. It is only at the conclusion of those first two years that students can apply to the business school, just as other students begin to concentrate on their own majors.

The prerequisite number of classes students must take before applying is roughly equivalent to the total number of classes Wharton students can take outside of the Wharton curricula: 13. However, unlike Wharton, McIntire students take a broad range of classes in their first two years, rather than spreading them out over the course of four years.

Granted, the strength, and possibly sanity, of many Wharton students is that they can spread these non-business classes out over their entire time in college. But for the sake of current ranking superiority, let's consider the McIntire way.

In the first two years at UVA, business-bound students, like their liberal-arts peers, study statistics, mathematics, humanities and foreign languages. In their final two years of college, the curriculum is rigorous and focused almost entirely on business classes. This is a very different approach to an undergraduate business degree.

I would argue that Penn has a problem.

When Amy Gutmann assumed the Penn presidency, she outlined the tenets of her "Penn Compact." You can look it up online, but the basic precept is to integrate knowledge and make it more accessible for students of all backgrounds.

She noted in her inaugural address that "Penn has made worthy strides in integrating knowledge. Yet, for all of our progress, we, like our peers, still remain too divided into disciplinary enclaves. We must better integrate knowledge in order to comprehend our world."

Speaking with a Whartonite friend of mine recently, he told me that in his first two years of college, which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, he has yet to have a truly good professor. He described every Wharton professor he has had as "bad to mediocre." Of course, my friend expects things to get better in the next two years, but this is a disgrace to our Ivy League institution to have any student make it through 20 courses at Penn and feel this way.

Despite the enthusiasm of Gutmann, and all of her accomplishments, the gap she spoke of five years ago persists. And something must seriously be considered to remedy this divide.

For some College students, the decision to pursue business came only after their college application process. Some Wharton students are working for a business degree they now realize they never really wanted. After all, most students think of switching their majors numerous times once getting to college.

The truth is, few really know what will make them happy at age 22 in the winter of their senior year in high school. And while students can switch schools, the requirements to transfer into Wharton are significantly more challenging. That's a detriment, to every undergraduate. Let's consider a model that allows easier transfer between schools, with an eye toward a more open curriculum for freshmen and sophomores in the future.

Colin Kavanuagh is a College sophomore from Tulsa, Okla. The Sooner, the Better appears on alternating Mondays. His email address is kavanaugh@dailypennsylvanian.com.

Comments (8)

Colin, you are not in Wharton. You have not experienced the undergraduate degree requirements, and therefore your claim that Penn has an "integration problem" really has no standing. Further, if you base your entire article off one friend who happened to really botch up course selection, then that is just shoddy journalism. Wharton opens so many doors, and I for one have had amazing Professors during all four of my undergraduate years.

Exactly Chris. Remember, the data used to make this ranking actually changes very little throughout the years. So the rankers constantly jigger with their methodology (claiming they're constantly trying to improve it) in order to produce exactly these discussions around their magazine. They want to sell magazines, year in, year out, NOT create a meaningful, comparative measure of educational programs.

Chris & Senior - In current vernacular you can appreciate, using Mark to Market the market has currently marked Wharton Undergrad #3. Do I believe that's substantively the case, an emphatic No! Did last year's #1 faculty or students deteriorate in the last 12 months? Again an emphatic No! All #1 anythings are targets and cannot afford to be complacent with the status quo. Consider the possibility the market in some form is providing feedback, like it or not - and I don't. My greater concern is not the ranking or methodology, but rather the tendency for complacency by those who are running truly storied undergrad and grad programs. (Lest I be considered an alarmist, I'm also a sports fan, and would never have believed the storied basketball program would come to what it has become.) EN

Yeah, I have to agree with Chris. To say that there are NO good Wharton professors because one of 2400 undergrads hasn't had "any" in their first two years is to say that most wharton undergrads believe in communism because one does. Take a look through Penn Course Review and the quality of professors. If you had, you would have noted that some of the HIGHEST rated professors are in fact in Wharton.

Chris & Steve - Your Wharton experience mirrors mine, an experience I continue to be grateful to have had. Yet the question remains why the decline in ranking? "Rankings are a snapshots of one point in time..." and similar comments by Admin reps regrettably echo as so much sour grapes. Ratings are uniformly great when favorable, but merely a snapshot when not. At least Colin Kavanaugh tried to delve into why the drop, and while I too disagree with him, I respect his attempt. EN

Ernie, I'm glad to hear your experience has been similar to mine, but in terms of the drop in rankings I feel that many undergraduates are overreacting. The primary reason Wharton dropped in ranking was because BusinessWeek changed the way they calculate the composite score. They essentially increased the weight placed on a qualitative student survey. While I believe there is merit to a qualitative measure within the rankings, I am not really all that surprised that we dropped. It is not so much a reflection on the quality of the program (as Colin would have you believe) but more on the general student life surrounding the University as a whole. All and all, Wharton is still the premier undergraduate business school, and people need to stop reading into this so much.

Good and bad professors can be found in all the schools at Penn. As a former undergrad, I also found that an enthusiastic TA can compensate for a crappy prof. Colin, your Whartonite friend has either really bad luck in choosing instructors or way too persnickety didactic demands. Besides, three of the undergrad divisions are, by design, specialized programs. Would you mandate that the nursing students take quantum physics or engineers study postmodern feminism? Let the fiancial analysts, engineers, and nurses focus on what they do best! The Europeans, with their focused univeristy curricula, often view our American "liberal arts" approach as diffuse and inefficient. Note that most Europeans obtain BA/BS degrees at a fraction of US educational costs. (Oxford, Cambridge, & La Sorbonne are actually cheaper than Penn!) To all the Whartonites: chill out! The "slack-jawed yokels" attending UVA and Notre Dame aren't going to break the stranglehold that elite private school alumni have in the financial sector. Is it fair for a UMichigan finance major to lose an analyst job offer to a Princeton art history major? You and your ilk are deeply entrenched at the major banks; moreover, your half-baked policies and manipulation of the masses has led the world into its current economic turmoil. One attitude that was pervasive among Whartonites during my time at Penn was that they were the creme-de-la-creme. They maintained this arrogance even with those of us in the college and engineering who were high school valedictorians, had higher SAT scores, had won national awards, were good athletes, or were studying difficult subjects. Many Whartonites even disdained the nursing students (So what if their SATs are lower? At least they're helping sick people!) Perhaps the magazine dropped Wharton's ranking out of disgust for its continued haughtiness. Maybe if you were nicer, the magazine editors would like you better. [QUOTE id="ee6816f9-b8dc-434a-bfbe-a06f590129b8"]Chris & Senior - In current vernacular you can appreciate, using Mark to Market the market has currently marked Wharton Undergrad #3. Do I believe that's substantively the case, an emphatic No! Did last year's #1 faculty or students deteriorate in the last 12 months? Again an emphatic No! All #1 anythings are targets and cannot afford to be complacent with the status quo. Consider the possibility the market in some form is providing feedback, like it or not - and I don't. My greater concern is not the ranking or methodology, but rather the tendency for complacency by those who are running truly storied undergrad and grad programs. (Lest I be considered an alarmist, I'm also a sports fan, and would never have believed the storied basketball program would come to what it has become.) EN[/QUOTE]

Colin, Most of us chose Wharton because we judged its curriculum to be the best match for our interests and goals. It is quite pretentious for you, a college student, to recommend changes to the Wharton curriculum. We all knew how Penn is segregated when we applied. You seem to think that Wharton students are miserable. If this were the case they would drop to the college. The dissatisfaction is usually among college students who wish they were in Wharton but don�?t have a high enough GPA to transfer. In my two years at Wharton, all but one of my professors has been exceptional. I would be shocked if there are professors equal to Dr. G., Professor Lee, and Professor Roberts anywhere. I know you spoke out of ignorance, but your statement is nevertheless offensive. I am disappointed in you and the editors for publishing such a ridiculous allegation.

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