Paying for College: What Do You Need to Learn?

I went to China to teach corporation finance and investment finance, two basic introductory classes taken by most business majors. Upon arrival in Chengdu, I discovered that there were no students enrolled in corporation finance, but they didn’t have anyone to teach accounting or business law. Could I?

I’m not a CPA, and I never taught either course. However, my MBA came with concentrations in both finance and accounting, I have the Chartered Financial Analyst designation, and I worked as an analyst for many years. Sure, I could teach debits and credits, income statements and balance sheets, and explain why they mattered.

I skated through B-school without taking business law, but I had a broker’s license at one point and dealt with some securities law issues on the job. I also deal with contracts as a writer, enough to know that the issue is rarely legality but rather the other party being a jerk. (And I am always amazed at how many jerks are out there, although really, I should know better by now.)

So I bought the textbook, did the reading, and took it on.

It occurred to me how much of business law was minutiae that really, no one will need to know ever again. I’ve made it this far in life without knowing what a bailment is or what it means for collateral to be perfected, you know?

When I teach finance, I think backward. What do you need to know on the job, and how will it make sense to you. Memorizing the equations isn’t important in the long run, but the equations and concepts fit together and if you get the concepts and know a little algebra, you can reason back to the math. Is that a good approach, or a bad one? I don’t know. I suspect it works for most students but shortchanges anyone who wants to get a Ph.D.

In my dream world, students would do course evaluations a year after the class to report if they remember anything and if they learned what they needed to learn for their upper-level classes.

If I were designing a college curriculum, there would be some core skills that everyone would need to master, some core subjects everyone would need to learn, some courses related to a specific fields, and a lot of flexibility to study whatever the heck you wanted to study without worrying about whether it would be relevant to an employer. There would be more writing and more foreign language, less trivia and fewer classes on narrow fields like sports management. (Basic management is basic management, you know? It boils down to maturity, the ability to make good decisions, and the power to get others to support those decisions.)

In my business law class, I included some in-class exercises on dispute resolution and contract negotiation, which are great skills to have no matter what you do in life. If I taught the course again, I’d probably make it almost entirely about negotiation after a week or two on the Constitution, consumer protection, property protection, and basics of tort law.

Professors sometimes talk about academic bulimia: students cram their heads full of memorized facts for an exam, then forget it all immediately afterward. That being said, the work of preparing for an exam often forces students to engage with material in a way that they don’t when listening to lectures.

Somehow, there has to be a way to make courses relevant without watering them down and rigorous without making them trivial. That’s the challenge, and that’s what course evaluation should be about.