Mind

Expand Business Offerings

Rationale

Evidence shows high demand for business education from prospective students and their families. While we know that liberal arts education provides students with a solid foundation for many career paths, the uncertainty of the current and future job market has led students and their families to seek out opportunities for gaining business skills and knowledge while at Sewanee. This can be seen in the popularity of the Wm. Polk Carey Pre-Business Program and the business minor, which has been the most popular minor at Sewanee since its inception, and which currently includes about 25% of both the senior and junior classes. Furthermore, the success of the Carey Fellowship program in converting applicants to enrolled students indicates that our efforts to draw more students to campus by investing in business programming can be successful.

The goal in expanding business offerings is to provide students with coursework in important business disciplines to enhance their major. We believe that the costs of creating a traditional business major at this time outweigh its potential benefits for the University. However, there remain several promising and cost-effective ways of increasing our business programming to attract more students to campus while keeping our historic commitment to a traditional liberal arts curriculum.

Description

Sewanee will continue to provide students with the value of a liberal arts education while expanding our business offerings throughout the curriculum with the aim of attracting more prospective students to the College. The University will do so in two ways:

  • By expanding our current business programming.
    • Expand the size of the Carey Fellows program to attract more top students interested in business.
    • Increase the number of tracks in the business minor to include areas such as Arts Leadership, Science Management, and Data Analytics.
    • Transform the current tracks in the business minor into stand-alone minors, such as Accounting or Marketing.
    • Selectively add business courses that would align with current departments and augment our curricular offerings.
    • Improve marketing of Sewanee business offerings by offering a clearer narrative on our website and in our marketing materials about how our offerings prepare students for careers in business.
  • By expanding business-related programming within the Office of Career Readiness and Student Success.
    • Expand our suite of marquee business-related internships.
    • Diversify the types of internship opportunities we offer by concentrating on adding internships in consulting, entrepreneurship, and sustainability.
    • Connect underrepresented minority students more thoughtfully with accomplished alumni and professionals from Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous backgrounds, as well as first-generation college graduates.
    • Create a series of low-credit-hour courses that build out of the Sewanee 101 course proposed as part of the First Year Experience and the one-credit courses proposed in the relationship-rich student initiative that will either introduce students to specific business fields or give them career-readiness skills specifically tailored to their careers.
Supporting Tactics
  • Expand the Carey Fellows program.
  • Expand business internship opportunities.
  • Consider hiring an additional faculty member in business to shore up current pinch points in business offerings and allow for expansion of courses, tracks, and business minors.
  • Arrange for alumni to mentor students from underrepresented groups.