Save the Arts, Cut Business

Opinion – The MSU Exponent

When budgets are tightened, stern gray utilitarians emerge from their newly-renovated buildings to inform us that it’s the creative and humanities-oriented types they’ve looked down on for years should suffer when the state decides to slash education funding.
The Montana state university system is facing a potential $23 million budget shortfall, so some combination of budget cuts and tuition hikes will almost certainly be necessary to close the gap. The arts and humanities seem to be on the cutting block by default, but the equally-expensive business college somehow tends to evade scrutiny in public conversations on budget cuts.
In 2010 (the most recent department-level data available online), the MSU College of Business Instruction received $3.9 million, Art received $1.5 million, Media and Theater Arts received $1.5 million and Music received $1.4 million, for a combined total of $4.4 million. History and Philosophy received $1.8 million, Political Science received $600,000, English received $1.7 million and Sociology received $900,000 for a total of $5 million. Anyone seeking to fill a budgetary hole by cutting the arts or humanities could squeeze just about as much money out of cutting the business college, and MSU would not have to sacrifice concerts, theater performances or the core subjects of a liberal education.
While both the arts and humanities have deep value in fostering self-expression and the exploration of the human experience through art or the creation of an educated and engaged citizenry through the humanities, the College of Business does not even pretend to have intrinsic value. Its entire purpose is to prepare students to be high earners, and business colleges as a whole do an abysmal job at even this limited mission. Business majors come in 56th in long-term earning potential, behind archetypical “useless majors” like philosophy and history, in part because the job market is flooded with them — business majors make up about 20 percent of college graduates — and in part because 93 percent of ...


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