State of Undergraduate Business Education: A Perfect Storm or Climate Change?

Many students show little improvement in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and written communication while in undergraduate school, but the data are especially unfavorable for business majors. Some writers attribute the current state of undergraduate education to a “perfect storm” caused by an improbable convergence of forces. My purpose here is to argue that climate change should replace the perfect storm framework for understanding the undergraduate business education crisis. First, I explain how metaphors guide our thinking and actions. Second, I examine a perfect storm as a dominant metaphor for disasters and introduce climate change as an alternative. Although both meteorological metaphors entail a crisis caused by a convergence of forces, they differ in terms of probability, duration, and responses. Third, I describe the crisis and several of its causes. Finally, informed by climate change literature, I suggest that because a perfect storm is a brief unlikely event, climate change is more apt. The state of undergraduate business education reflects a “new normal” that requires sweeping top-down change. However, in the face of institutional inertia (Khurana, 2007), I pragmatically suggest small but meaningful bottom-up tactics that should appeal to many stakeholders without provoking “solution aversion” (Campbell & Kay, 2014).