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.

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