By Richard A. Moser, '83
Lawrence Today magazine, Fall 2002
Business has many clear measures of success: Return on Investment, Earnings per Share, Return on Assets, and others. Education has no such convenient metrics. Its product, while very real, is essentially intangible. Lawrence-bred CEOs strongly endorse the liberal arts tradition for its positive ROE -- Return on Education -- and its value as preparation for a business career.
Twenty years ago -- on Parents Weekend, coincidentally enough -- the front page of The Lawrentian student newspaper asked a question often on the minds of those visiting funders, and one as inevitable as it was unanswerable: "Are we getting our money's worth?"
It was, of course, the wrong question -- or, perhaps, a relevant question put the wrong way. But, at an annual cost of about $9,000 at the time, it was a question that presented itself -- a question that has become no less insistent at today's cost of around $29,000 per year.
The conclusion reached by the student editors, after exhaustive research and debate, involving a commensurate quantity of beer, was that the jury was out: "The answer," concluded The Lawrentian, "is a definitive maybe."
Lawrence Today thought the question worth reopening, and worth recasting in a way that better suits the nature of the subject, and approached me, as an alumnus from the business world, to take on the assignment. In the course of researching this article, I interviewed a sampling of Lawrentians who have attained the station of chief executive officer of a business enterprise.
For an institution of its size, Lawrence has schooled an impressive number and range of CEOs, of whom the participants in this article represent only a sample. They run the gamut of the business world, with the group balanced between entrepreneurs who have created their own successful companies and managers who have risen through the ranks to run established enterprises.
These Lawrentians lead organizations ranging in size from fewer than 20 employees to more than 48,000 and from a single location to a global network, in fields from healthcare to software, from banking to the blues. What they have in common is not just the shared experience of a Lawrence education but a shared appreciation for the way it helped them develop into the very different individuals they became, achieving success in their own unique ways.
While there are many ways to get at the value of an education -- and a different group of distinguished alumni from different fields might provide a very different perspective -- this group, well-versed in the mart of commerce, is eminently qualified to address that question in its original, hard-edged terms: Does a liberal arts education provide a direct return on investment as measured by the preparation it provides for a career, specifically in the world of business?
This time, the jury is definitely in, with a strong endorsement of the value of liberal arts education that is as thoughtful as it is pragmatic.
What's it all about?
"The reason I went to Lawrence -- the thing that impressed me at the front end -- was this idea that you get a very well-rounded liberal arts education," says Harry Jansen Kraemer, '77 (math and economics), chairman and CEO of Baxter International, a global leader in medical therapeutics based in Deerfield, Illinois.
"In fact," Kraemer continues, "I remember that one of the first addresses I attended in the Lawrence Chapel put it very plainly: 'What you're going to do here is learn how to educate yourself. We're going to help you really learn how to read, how to write, how to express yourself, how to get yourself on the road to the life you choose. This is not about finding a job; in fact, we're not sure you're even going to find a job. But what you will do is really the most valuable thing: learning how to educate yourself for your entire life.'"
Kraemer goes straight to the rub, the central question in the modern market for higher education: what is its purpose? Should college education be dedicated to high-minded Platonic ideals about shaping philosopher kings or specialize in getting kids ready to find jobs? On this question, different juries disagree.
A recent survey polled a selection of interested audiences on their views of liberal arts education versus larger universities and specialty schools. Sponsored by Hobart and William Smith Colleges, a Lawrence peer institution in Geneva, New York, the study was funded by the AT&T Foundation and conducted by the Yankelovich polling organization.
What the survey concluded, as summarized by Richard Hersh, then president of Hobart and William Smith and now president of Trinity College, is that "a transforming liberal arts education is not currently understood by the public to be a necessity for life in the 21st century. Rather, the sense is that education must be practical; its mantra, 'Get a job!' Thus, each spring, more than one million high school students, shouldering the anxious hopes of their parents and the larger culture, choose a college that will give them a 'practical education.' This view was discouragingly summarized by one student who responded, 'If I'm going to be an accountant, what do I care what someone did in ancient Egypt?'"
This what's-the-payoff orientation was represented overwhelmingly by college-bound students (85 percent of respondents) and their parents (75 percent), who agreed that the ultimate goal of college is to secure a first job. Strikingly, however, that view was shared by only about one-third of the people who will be offering those jobs, as represented by businesspeople who participated in the survey. By 2-1, CEOs and human resources professionals endorsed the long-term outcomes of a college education, those that prepare one, according to Hersh, "not only for a first job, but for a long and viable career." These same leaders recognized the liberal arts as the best preparation for achieving these outcomes.
The CEOs and human resource managers who participated in the survey consistently emphasized the importance of three clusters of skills: cognitive, presentational, and social. Cognitive skills, as defined in this exercise, include problem solving, critical thinking, and "learning to learn." Presentational skills were defined as oral and written communication about oneself, ideas, and data that is clearly, coherently, articulately, and persuasively presented. Social skills were considered to include the ability to work with others cooperatively in a variety of settings and across cultural barriers.
Based on the study's findings, Hersh concluded: "Business has grown more international, more competitive, and more susceptible to technology-driven change. In such a climate, rigid specialists, limited to one specific skill, are quickly left behind. In the workplace of the future, graduates must be capable of independent thought, creativity, risk-taking, perseverance, and entrepreneurship, as well as being open to new ideas and willing to express unpopular points of view." These are precisely the skills and qualities independently cited by the Lawrentian CEOs.
"My business is characterized by highly competitive global markets and a very rapid pace of change," says John Luke, Jr.,'71 (Asian studies), president and CEO of MeadWestvaco, a leading manufacturer of paper, packaging, and chemical products, based in Stamford, Connecticut. "A liberal arts education gives you the grounding to think, to anticipate, to manage through challenges much better than a narrower university experience, with an overly specialized focus."
"The liberal arts offer the opportunity to be exposed to a wider variety of thinking," says Gretchen Jahn, '73 (psychology) [not pictured], founder, president, and CEO of Aegis Analytical Corporation, a Lafayette, Colorado-based, software company that specializes in manufacturing enterprise compliance. "One of the most important values I absorbed at Lawrence -- and that I've seen in business -- is that what counts is not knowing the answers but the questions to ask in order to find the answers. Liberal arts thinking helps you learn to ask the right questions."
David Mulford, '59 (economics and history), London-based chairman international of the financial services company Credit Suisse First Boston, agrees: "A liberal arts background provides people with confidence and a basis of broad knowledge that allows them to take a more creative approach to life. It allows them to take more diverse jobs, develop more skills, and embrace more varied experiences than those who are trained in one thing and see themselves as such, like the fellow who says 'I am an engineer; therefore this is what I do.'"
"I feel I have an incredible advantage over people who went directly to business school and never experienced a liberal arts education," adds Kraemer. "Having a renaissance understanding of the world -- which the liberal arts are all about -- has an enormous impact. I think that, if somebody has a good liberal arts background, they have an understanding of balance and of breadth and context. Without that, if you've had an entirely business background, you'll think of yourself as a businessperson, rather than as a person in business."
Lawrence President Richard Warch examined this distinction in a 1985 essay.
"It has been said that you can tell you are being educated when your options increase," he wrote, "and that you can be sure the opposite is occurring when your options diminish. Too much of what passes for education falls into the latter camp; it is not education in the true sense at all but merely careerism disguised as curriculum."
"The fellow who pointed me to Lawrence said that at other schools you'll get training, at Lawrence you'll get an education," says Richard Case, founder and president of The Midland Certified Reagent Company, a Texas-based company that produces oligonucleotides for use in genetic research. "That's the Lawrence difference to me."
That was also the view of Henry Wriston, president of Lawrence from 1925 to 1937 and author of The Nature of a Liberal Arts College, a volume that demonstrates the immutability of this debate and of the liberal arts precepts that live to fight this fight in, it appears, every generation.
"The distinction between education and training," wrote Wriston, "is that one is growth, the other is acquisition of a specific skill. That is why training is so easy to measure and education is so difficult . . . Not all the knowing can substitute for the growth of a creative spirit, that flowering of the individual mind, which we may recognize but cannot measure."
With striking consistency, the Lawrentian CEOs endorsed this distinction in the purpose and nature of education and made clear their preference for those with the broad and balanced exposure provided by liberal arts over specialization, even specialization in the fields in which their businesses operate.
Dale Schuh, '70 (math), president and CEO of Sentry Insurance, of Stevens Point, Wisconsin, summarized this idea: "It's difficult to be really fully trained for an area. Things move much too fast. You need to be able to deal with new problems and conceptualize solutions to them. Lawrence provides so much interdisciplinary exposure, you can't help but broaden your perspective in ways that help you learn how to put ideas together. If you want to be just an accountant, study accounting, but if you want to go from there to CEO, you'd better know more and have a broader perspective."
Metamorphosis
"The liberal arts prepare you for a life, not a job," agrees Mike Cisler, C'78 (music), president of JanSport, Inc., a manufacturer of outdoor gear and apparel based in Appleton.
"Learning a specific set of skills just isn't enough. Virtually everybody I work with went to school for something other than what they're doing today."
That confounding of expectations is a blessing, according to Bruce Iglauer, '69 (theatre and drama), the founder and president of Chicago-based Alligator Records, arguably the country's leading blues music recording label.
"This is a wonderful time in the world, because things are changing so quickly," says Iglauer. "There are jobs and things to do with your life that didn't exist five to ten years ago."
It was by using their flexibility to take such jobs throughout their careers that the Lawrentian CEOs made their way. They've exemplified the adaptability they cite as a signal virtue of liberal arts thinking by using it to find and seize new opportunities or to meet new challenges as they've come along. None of them did quite what they'd originally expected to do in the way they'd expected to do it. Some have moved between fields and organizations; others have served in a variety of capacities in the same organizations. All have been surprised at one time or another by the turns they've taken -- but all were intellectually ready when they came.
Cisler started with the company that became JanSport as a student and stayed on in his first summer following graduation "to help them figure out a sales forecast." In the early '80s, "on the strength of two-thirds of one computer course at Lawrence," he became the company's MIS guy and installed its first computer system.
"Having the lack of too much discipline can be a good thing," says Cisler, "especially in leadership roles. The open-mindedness of the liberal arts -- the ability to look at different angles and bring together knowledge -- is a critical skill to have in business."
"I never perceived the blues as a career," says Iglauer. "It was my passion. None of this was carefully planned -- especially the part about becoming a businessman, which I had no desire to do. This was the '60s -- businessmen were evil capitalists and money-grubbers. If I'd realized you could be a businessman and still be poor, I might have gone for it."
President Wriston recognized this dimension of the life-preparation dilemma and celebrated it as a point at which young people can be readied for lives of adaptation and evolutionary growth, rather than fixation on a single goal:
"Though it is much the harder educational program for the college, everything should be done to keep vocational choices plastic, to multiply opportunities for choice. Instead of regretting instability of vocational purpose, the college should capitalize on it as a means of broadening the student's interest and deepening his acquaintance with ideas."
This principle was exemplified precisely in the path followed by Mulford, who recalls: "When I finished at Lawrence I didn't know what I'd do. I considered law school," as virtually all Lawrentians do at one time or another. Instead, he won a series of fellowships -- Rotary, Ford, White House -- and used the time they provided to learn about "what made countries work," a study he augmented with an exhaustive series of interviews with corporations, foundations, universities, and government agencies to find out what was available in the world and how it all came together. "Then a light went on: I wanted to do international finance, because it was so catholic. It all came together there."
Mulford's subsequent course led him from Wall Street to Saudi Arabia, where he headed a team of advisors investing the nation's oil revenues throughout the 1970s, as its petro-power peaked; to Washington, as undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury; and on to Credit Suisse.
"Lawrence awakened me," he says. "It showed me the possibilities and helped me see how to understand them and how to capture them."
From Freshman Studies to senior management
Without exception, and without prompting, all of the Lawrentian CEOs interviewed brought the virtues of their liberal arts education at Lawrence back to its beginning, in Freshman Studies, as a microcosm of the experience.
"Freshman Studies was humbling," recalls Schuh, "and it drove home the critical thinking that's the cornerstone of the Lawrence program. It's a multi-dimensional approach, and to be well-rounded and well-read goes a long way." "To me, Lawrence emphasized two essential values," says Luke, "the importance of critical thinking and of tolerance for others' ideas. Together, those values foster a bias for continuous learning, and that's vital for success in business. Those who implode are those who think they know it all, that their model is sound and lasting. Thomas Kuhn teaches us better in the first trimester of our Lawrence experience."
"That experience has been uniquely valuable for my entire life," Jahn says of Freshman Studies. "For instance, I later took a two-year course of business study. For most of my classmates, a major portion of the learning was how to speak, think, and write clearly. We had papers or presentations due every two weeks. That was a major problem for a lot of my classmates, but I was used to doing one every week for Freshman Studies. It's a really outstanding program, and I don't think Lawrence gets enough credit for what it does."
Rhetorical rubber meets reality road
It is reassuring to those of us with Lawrence diplomas that CEOs -- of and educated by our alma mater -- believe in its applied value in the business world, but how do liberal artists actually perform versus their peers who have specialized in business, engineering, and other more "practical" courses of education?
A bracing piece of good, relatively hard data: A 1980 study of liberal arts graduates from the Classes of 1955, 1960, and 1965 compared their career paths with specialists in various fields over a 15- to 25-year period. While the liberal arts graduates had started at lower salaries, the report noted, "over a period of time ranging from three to 14 years, they outdistanced the field in every one of those occupations in salaries and presumably in value to their organizations."
Similarly, a 20-year longitudinal study conducted by AT&T found that "the Bell System's liberal arts graduates were promoted faster, were rated higher in administrative skills, and were found to have more management potential than technical graduates. After 20 years at the company, 43 percent of liberal arts graduates had achieved the fourth level of AT&T management, compared to 32 percent of the company's business majors and 23 percent of those trained as engineers."
Mulford, of Credit Suisse, has observed the same pattern. "When I was at the Department of the Treasury, our international group had over 250 people, many of them highly trained economists, and the Treasury bureaucracy is viewed as probably the best in Washington. What I discovered was that the people who did best for me -- on debt, trade issues, currency, economic reform, opening markets -- the people who were best at framing issues and coming up with solutions were people with a basic foundation in the liberal arts. They could make the connections. The extreme specialist was better used in narrower things.
"I see the same thing in the private sector," Mulford continues. "In London we tend to hire people from Oxford and Cambridge with liberal arts backgrounds who come to learn business. They have what we're looking for: curious minds, interest in a broad range of knowledge. We can teach them business. It's the generally educated person who will provide leadership and judgment."
Megatrends diviner John Naisbitt puts this question into current perspective: "Today's graduate is entering a society where the specialist is often soon obsolete, but where the adaptable generalist is highly welcome. An interesting phenomenon is occurring," Naisbitt observes. "There's an increasing demand for liberal arts graduates, especially by businesses that offer management-training programs. Why the demand? Because liberal arts students have learned how to learn."
Or, as distilled by management uber-guru Peter Drucker, "Management is of necessity based on, and applied to, all the liberal arts."
Via Negativa?
Let us consider that the point has been established that liberal arts education is an effective developer of the intellectual habits and capacity that prepare students well for potential careers in the world of business. Let us accept, also, that it inculcates values that can provide advantage in that arena. Does this, in fact, constitute preparation for a business career? Does it present that course as an attractive life option worthy of those skills? In short, does the liberal arts milieu take away with one hand -- its cultural biases -- the potential it offers with the other?
There is, perhaps, a somewhat white-shoed tendency of the liberal arts that places business at the far end of a long patrician nose, a belief that, while the support that business can offer to finer and higher things, such as the academy, is useful, it provides scant justification for the vulgar pursuit of profit. The proper application of the liberally educated mind, the via positiva, as tacitly and often overtly implied by its shapers, is in nobler endeavors such as saving the world, making art, or teaching the liberal arts. In other words, Lawrence and its sister institutions are not strong encouragers of the business life, which they seem to regard with an attitude of, "If you must."
"There is a sense in which the college seems to consider business as somehow not honorable," says Jahn.
Cisler agrees: "There's sort of a reluctant concession that most of you have to do it -- the real world happens," he says, "but business really isn't looked at as a noble pursuit."
"I wish Lawrence would better recognize the value of business, that it can be a good calling," says Mulford, "because business can be a very powerful engine for positive change in the world. For instance, when you privatize a company, you alter it and its industry fundamentally, forever, putting power into the hands of the people. When we privatized YPF, the state-owned oil company of Argentina, it went in one year from being an overstaffed, low productivity organization that consumed the country's taxes to an efficient producer that paid them, instead."
"What is missing at a place like Lawrence is a constructive exposure to the opportunities that exist in the business world and the idea that it, too, is a place of noble calling," says Luke. "I would encourage more conversation about the business world as a place where there's enormous opportunity for those with a Lawrence education to succeed and really make a difference."
The eighth liberal art?
So, given the applicability of the liberal arts tradition to the world of business and given the desire of students, their parents, and their prospective employers for liberal arts graduates to gainfully apply those skills, should Lawrence and other liberal arts colleges add business-oriented classes to their curricula?
In fact, Lawrence has, in the past, offered more "practical" and work-preparatory oriented training. In the 19th century, the college -- the liberal arts core -- was the smallest unit of Lawrence, outnumbered three-to-one by students in the preparatory, "academical," and commercial departments, who were studying bookkeeping, business forms, and commercial arithmetic rather than the trivium and the quadrivium. Under President Samuel Plantz (1894-1924), Lawrence offered courses in insurance, business law, commerce, and business administration.
These developmental stages led Lawrence to the firm liberal arts commitment it has so long and faithfully maintained, a commitment clarified and cemented in the days of Henry Wriston, who stated his views on the matter rather plainly:
"The supporters of vocational guidance who premise their efforts upon economic determinism would destroy the college."
Or, as President Warch has put it: "We have no faddish courses, no caving in to simple-minded utilitarianism . . . Liberal arts can be illiberal if they are taught as a means to an end, as merely preparations for careers."
The Lawrentian CEOs agree, unanimously, that the college should stick to its last and continue to offer a traditional and "pure" liberal arts experience. "When I was at Lawrence, there was a lot of talk that, maybe, Lawrence should offer some business courses," says Kraemer, "but the perspective was that this would be a bastardization of liberal arts principles. I was for that, because I thought, 'This experience is about learning to understand the world. We can all figure out what we want to do later on.'"
"I'd like to see a greater awareness of the business world fostered," says Jahn, "and maybe a kind of liberal arts version of a b-school function -- not core business disciplines, like accounting, but in ways that would take advantage of the liberal arts' unique perspective and values, examining, for example, the crossover between business and economics or business and political science."
Cisler agrees that there could be interest and value in providing a liberal arts take on business that provides exposure and perspective.
"Courses on the skills or qualities needed for leadership could be useful," he says, "and those could be viewed through literature, such as Machiavelli or Sun Tzu."
Ultimately, however, he concludes, "What Lawrence does is what it should do. It needs to be responsive to the changing world -- such as responding to the rise of computerization -- but a big shift in emphasis wouldn't be right."
"I'd actually like to see more distinction between business and academia," says Case. "For instance, we need to preserve greater purity and independence of research. Lawrence should focus on what it does so well, and that's helping to prepare people's minds to do what they want to do in life."
Help wanted?
Given these business leaders' belief in the liberal arts, how are the job prospects for current and future graduates in their businesses? In the longer-term, outstanding. But students will probably need to add some more credentials before they sign on with companies headed by these Lawrentian CEOs.
"It's occurred to me -- somewhat facetiously, but only somewhat -- that if you could start as CEO of a company, then the liberal arts is really all the preparation you'd need," says Kraemer, "because it gives you the broad thinking and perspective and the integrative skills you need to see the whole picture of running a business in a complex environment. The problem is, the only way you're going to get there is by performing well through a long series of technical tasks, so you're going to have to pick up those specific skills to augment your liberal arts base."
Consequently, and because of the technical nature of its products, he adds, Baxter hires primarily those with advanced degrees and/or previous work experience. The same is generally true of the other Lawrentian-led companies. While the Viking CEOs are happy to see people with liberal arts backgrounds come through the door, they tend not to recruit directly from undergraduate liberal arts institutions. Nonetheless, the CEOs strongly advocate a broad liberal arts foundation as the best formula for long-term business success.
"We hire a lot of actuaries, and that's a pretty specialized skill," says Sentry's Schuh, "but we look for well-rounded individuals. We prefer not to hire someone with only an undergrad business degree for our professional jobs -- they have too narrow a focus."
"I will not ever hire someone with a computer science background," says Jahn, whose company develops software. "Their thinking is much too narrow for a business as competitive as mine."
Iglauer puts the same idea this way: "I occasionally lecture at Columbia College in Chicago, which is very arts-centered. And the students will ask what I'm looking for in the people I'm hiring. And my answer is always, 'Good writing skills.' These students are all taking music business classes, and they'll say, 'What about industry knowledge?' And my answer is, 'If you can think clearly, read well, and express yourself well, you can learn the industry. It's not a mystery. It's all there to be learned. The question is, can you take it in?'
"To me, if you can write in an organized manner, you can think in an organized manner," Iglauer says. "Many of the people who work for me don't come from a music industry background, but they're people whose brains work. I think that the liberal arts can help to nurture people to use these skills, especially."
In an intriguing twist, a number of liberal arts colleges -- including St. John's, Skidmore, and Hiram Colleges -- have established, or are planning to establish, graduate degrees to help those with more vocationally focused educational backgrounds gain a broader exposure. While the order is reversed from what has been the norm, and what is advocated by the Lawrentian CEOs, the exposure is better late than never.
So, while the Lawrence Class of '03 shouldn't take this article as a resume-targeting guide, the CEOs agree their future prospects are excellent at these companies and, most importantly, in any organization or pursuit, due to the unlimited adaptability and applicability of the skills sharpened by liberal arts education.
Valedictory
Which leads us back to the central question posed of old by The Lawrentian and rephrased somewhat by postgraduate experience: Is the significant investment represented by the tuition at Lawrence returned in the form of skills, experience, and knowledge that can be profitably employed by the student who gains them? Let's use the concept of "profit" here in its most literal sense and the one most commonly applied in this context: gaining a paying position in a money-making enterprise.
Clearly, the answer, as embodied and avowed by the Lawrentian CEOs, is emphatically in the affirmative. By and large, they feel that liberal education is not only an effective preparation for careers in business, but the most effective preparation.
But it's still the wrong question. And the CEOs agree -- preparation for work, while important and valuable, is, at best, a secondary goal of the liberal arts education they value.
When asked for their final valedictions, the CEOs' parting words of advice to today's students look well beyond the mere matter of finding a job.
"There's only one product your kid really needs," says Mulford, "confidence. With a liberal education you learn how to teach yourself, and that gives you the ability to change careers, to look at problems in the context of history, and to trust others."
Kraemer agrees: "When I think about leadership, I think of it as a very delicate balance between self-confidence and humility and getting people to realize that you're not an egotist, you're not obnoxious, but you've got a healthy level of self confidence. The liberal arts help you build confidence in your ability to learn and grow. They teach you to realize that you're never going to know everything, but you can find the things you need to find."
And that confidence in one's intellect and ability to grow and adapt opens the doors of possibility.
"I'm a person who followed his dream, and I'd love to tell other people to do the same," says Iglauer. "Donêt assume that the only role for you is a role that's already defined. Define your own job. And make sure that you do whatever you do in life with passion. If you don't have passion for it, don't do it."
"The good liberal arts education we received at Lawrence prepares us well for any direction we take," adds Luke. "Students are encouraged to learn and think liberally -- broadly and openly and with a generosity of spirit. It's preparation that readies one for life and a learning process that continues."
President Warch summarizes this debate, as well as the liberal arts approach to vocation and education:
"Our young people are so preoccupied with earning a living that they do not recognize that they should also lead a life. . . To live well and to live responsibly . . . that aspiration -- that vision, if you will -- drives Lawrence. And holding fast to that aspiration is, for us, what it means to be a liberal arts college."
JanSport's Cisler puts it somewhat less grandly but more succinctly: "Get an education. Learn to be a person. Do that, and you'll get a job."
This noble notion was captured with greater brevity still by Tony Hurtig, '82, now CEO of Anthony Hurtig, Architect, in Evanston, Illinois. Writing in the self-same issue of The Lawrentian 20 years ago as a then-recent graduate, he neatly summed up the ultimate purpose of liberal education.
"Don't get a job," read his epistle to the Lawrentians, from the front lines of the job search. "Get a life."
Rick Moser, '83, has spent most of his years since Lawrence writing for CEOs, most recently as vice president of public affairs at Abbott Laboratories, which is what recommended him to write about them here. Rick is currently Abbott's vice president, international policy. He lives in Glenview, Illinois, with Lisa Miller Moser, '84, and their children, Aly, Lucy, and Will.