A New Trend

I was looking through Yahoo Finance today and stumbled across an article that talked about how business students are losing value with recruiters.  Companies are beginning to stray away from Business undergraduates because the new era of students are lacking critical-thinking and problem solving. To quote the article, "The biggest complaint: The undergraduate degrees focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and don't develop enough critical thinking and problem-solving skills through long essays, in-class debates and other hallmarks of liberal-arts courses." As I read the article I sat back and thought, "How does my education at Plymouth State stack up against some of the biggest business schools in the nation?"

Looking back on the education I feel that Plymouth State is ahead of the curve. With that being said I am not entirely sure of these other schools exact curriculums. Plymouth State has built into their curriculums to take course outside of your major to help build a broader knowledge base in a variety of subjects. At the time it seemed silly to take courses like weather when I was majoring in a Business discipline. Now I see that I have a vast knowledge of many subjects outside of just the core business courses. Things I may have never learned if I was not pushed to to take courses outside of the major.

My next thought about why I feel that Plymouth State is ahead of the curve is because of the small class sizes we offer. Granted we do have a few courses that are in lecture halls but for the most part they are all in classes that can hold no more the 30ish students. It allows the students at Plymouth to participate in debates and work through problems. It allows Plymouth State students to get away from strictly technical learning which does not allow for deeper learning. It stays on the surface and only allows the students to know the process and not understand why to do that or deeper thinking about the topic to be able to implement it in a different way. These big schools have more lectures which may a negative effect on the learning of certain topics that needed to have deeper thought involved in it.

Overall I feel that Plymouth has set up its future graduates for success because of the curriculum we have set in place for success.