Crimson Publishes Student's Opinion About Business School In Operation

This article was written by Edmund H. Bigelow, Princeton '33, now a first year student in the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration. It in printed here for the benefit of seniors and all others contemplating entering the Business School, in an attempt to give a description of the School as the student sees it.

Many college men planning business careers ask--why a school to teach subjects that have always been learned through practical experience? And the answer is that there are schools for business for the same reason that there are schools for law and medicine and architecture and for to her professions.

It has not been many years since a young man planning to become a lawyer went not to a law school, but direct to a lawyer's office where he started in to gain his practical experience as an office boy. After 15 or 20 years if he was successful, he managed to get his head up far enough to have a look around and get a broad view of the profession in which he had been spending his life. Lawyers realized that if a man were enabled by means of schooling to get this general picture of the profession beforehand, he would, upon entering a law office, have some definite idea in regard to where he was headed and would thus more easily and quickly master details which now fit into a complete preconceived picture where before they were meaningless and tiresome trivia. It was the difference between a worm's-eye view, and the lawyers and the doctors and many other professions found that the worm could work more intelligently if it realized what the birds were doing.

Need for Wide Viewpoint

The opportunities ahead are different in character and requirements from those of the past. They exist not only in the regular fields of business--in Manufacturing, Distribution, Banking, Accounting and Statistics--but, as the last year has proved, they are present in the many departments of the government where it impinges on business or in the branches of business definitely involved with the government. Labor needs leaders acquainted with business, and business, officers conversant with and able to handle labor problems in a statesmanlike manner. It is rather difficult properly to grasp and appreciate the size and complexity which these developments indicate from the vantage point of an office assistant.

Advantages of Advanced Training

The high-pressure competition coincident with the growth of modern business leads to the common sense deduction that one can best meet such competition by giving himself the advantage of all the advance preparation available. Today it is practically impossible for a bank to train its younger men in all the departments and in the broad policies affecting the general operation of the bank of its policies affecting public interest. The business has become impersonal and departmentalized, and the beginner finds himself in a position analogous to that of the individual who spends his days punching rivet hole number 262 in the Ford plant. The chances of a young man getting lost in a bank are many times greater than in years past. And the same situation exists in practically all other fields of business. Of course, the special qualification which consists of a personal acquaintance with the boss still can not be beaten when it comes to getting a job. But once you have the job and begin thinking about getting ahead, you are apt to find that the boss of the present day firm has very little time to keep the acquaintance fresh. A little advanced business training will stand you in better stead.

Here is the Evidence

You don't have to take my word for all of this, and you probably will not. So by way of backing myself up I would like to quote from a letter recently written by the chairman of the board of one of our largest industrial corporations to a college senior who was planning on entering business and who believed that the best and quickest way to get ahead was to start in "cold" and learn everything from the bottom up.

". . . . In the past few years we have observed so many men coming into places of considerable importance in the financial and business world who have graduated from the Harvard Business School that we have become converts to the theory that a man can equip himself for executive or administrative responsibilities in the world of business with greater certitude and with less expenditure of time by taking the Harvard course.

Drudgery Now Obviated

"In other words, the old-fashioned and generally accepted theory that a man must pass through all the various departmental activities of business before he can be fitted for administrative work is now well night abandoned. It is no longer necessary to go through many years of departmental drudgery to possess a cultured and scientific knowledge of business principles. The Harvard course has resolved those things into a system which will give a man in two years a far greater and more commanding knowledge of the controlling laws as well as the actual technique of business than he can obtain in ten years of old-fashioned manual occupations purely mechanical and easy to understand at a glance. Why then, take months in performing subordinate matters of pure detail?

"I am convinced that where a man can obtain such scientific training before he enters business he will derives greater advantage from five years of practical experience than an older general advantage from five years of practical experience than an older generation acquired in twenty . . . . ."

Course Aids In Career-Choosing

Many college graduates are undecided as to what type of work they would like or could do well or as to ways of Finding the right opening. This is a quite natural uncertainty, for college training has other objects in view. The training at the Harvard Business School by giving a student a definite picture of the various fields of business helps him to decide where his interest lies and assists him in reaching it. And it is frequently true that many students who come here with a fairly definite idea of what they desire to do change their ideas entirely when they know the requirements of the different branches of business.

The School does not attempt to teach a man the technical details of any job. The requirements for different positions vary so widely with individual concerns that this would not be feasible. Rather the attempt is made to equip the student with a broad back-ground of business training and an understanding of business methods which will enable him to comprehend and master more quickly the technical details of the work of the particular company with which he becomes connected.

Organization of Courses

The first year course is divided functionally into five groups: the two main branches of business, Production and Distribution, the means through which these are carried on, Finance, and the two tools of business, Accounting and Statistics. These five subjects vary widely at the beginning, but by the end of the year they have become coordinated into a comprehensible unit, and their interaction and mutual dependence are clearly brought out in the mind of the student.

In the second year the student specializes in a chosen field, such as banking, accounting, retail distribution and so forth. Be takes two or at the most three courses in his field and completes his schedule with courses associated with it in a general way. It is impossible for a man to specialize too narrowly, but on the other hand no schedule is approved which does not show a sensible correlation of courses in a given field.

Instruction is by the case or problem method followed by most of the leading law schools in the country. First year classes meet in sections of about 100 men. Second year classes vary between 40 and 100. The professors do not so much lecture as lead and direct a general discussion. The result is a tutorial system similar to that at the college, but on a larger scale.

Attempt to Teach Thinking

The aim of all the instruction is to teach the student to thing rather than to absorb facts, to seek to solve problems by critical analysis rather than by rote. In short, effort is made, not to train a man in "standard business practice" or to make him a specialist, but to develop a well rounded "general.