The Dynamic World of Education for Business; Issues, Trends, Forecasts
Southwestern Publishing Company, 1969, Preston P. LeBreton, Editor
Part 1 — Opportunities and Challenges Facing Education for Business

Article 8. — EDUCATION FOR RETAILlNG — Pages 63 – 66 [Reprinted by permission of the author.]
Woodrow W. Baldwin

There are many ways to achieve success in the field of retailing, as you know. If we were to trace the backgrounds of a representative group of retailers, we would probably run the gamut of possible avenues for achieving management positions. Some came up through the ranks, having learned more or less by the apprenticeship method; others had management training within the store or stores; others had training through distributive education programs; and some studied retailing in college.

I wish to talk today about what is happening in collegiate education for retailing.

Since there are so many types of institutions in which one may receive training for business, we recognized years ago that a definition of responsibilities of each of these institutions was necessary. The consensus was that four-year colleges and universities should concentrate on the problem-solving and the decision-making facets of business management rather than the training of skilled technicians.

During the 1930's and 40's education, to be justified, needed to have an almost immediate payoff. It was perfectly respectable at that time to have job preparation as your primary objective in collegiate business education. Businesses were less complicated than they are today, so if a person were trained for retailing skills, he could probably go into almost any store and apply them immediately. This type of education served these people well during their first few years; but when the time came for advancement to supervisory and administrative responsibilities, they were not ready.

Businessmen were saying, more and more, give us people who can think, and we'll teach them the techniques. Today, therefore, our purpose on the collegiate level is to train people to think, reason, communicate, and to make intelligent judgments; then to translate these into meaningful and useful satisfying experiences. The emphasis is on "why" rather than "how." We think persons who are being trained for future retailing leadership should have a strong background in the liberal arts. This should provide an understanding of the social, scientific, esthetic, and ethical aspects of the world in which we live. What we are attempting to do in retailing education today is to conduct our professional courses in such a way that they function as laboratories for those disciplines learned in the liberal arts. We all know that anything that is applied is better learned.

If our people, therefore, can derive from the liberal arts courses the ability to think, to reason, to communicate, and to make intelligent judgments, then our professional courses should provide the facility for applying these to business problems with the result that the disciplines will be translated into meaningful, useful, satisfying experiences.

As college professors, we are dedicated to the premise that a man functions best in a business capacity if he understands where and how his position relates to all other jobs within the company, all companies within the community, all communities within the nation, all nations within the world. Business is no longer an immediate neighborhood affair. Out students take a core of business courses which are designed to give them this kind of knowledge.

The retailing function is best understood when studied as a part of the entire marketing process. The specific courses in retailing then provide a focusing on specifics which develops maturity, not simply intellectual dexterity. These courses are the real proving ground to help us determine whether our students are actually interested in and qualified for careers in retailing.

We are also dedicated to the proposition that management training for an intelligent person makes a better employee even at the starting position. He is able to recognize why management policies are necessary and what his responsibility is in helping to achieve management's objectives. Almost all of us have a requirement of a period of fieldwork within the stores so the students can learn enough specifics to be useful to the employer at the outset, thus minimizing the amount of on-the-job training the employee will need at your store .

We are constantly being made aware today of the frequent changes which are taking place within business. If we train too much in the area of techniques rather than theories, then a student's education may be outmoded within a very short time. The field of retailing is too dynamic today to expect that the techniques will not change frequently. If a person has learned to recognize problems, has learned how to solve them, and knows how to implement changes, he has been educated to live with change of any kind.

At the time I was majoring in business administration in college such everyday terms as operations research, automation, behavioral science applications, and data processing were all nonexistent; and certainly the entire complexion of retailing has been substantially altered during recent years. To give only one example, the birth of suburban shopping centers has intensified the need for coordination and formal planning. The decentralization has meant that decisions are made by more people on more levels. So we hope that today our students are learning how to make decisions, how to implement them, how to communicate their thoughts and actions. They're learning human relations, basic concepts of modem business processes, especially the analysis and development of them. They're learning the entire marketing concept in order to understand the part retailing plays and a general understanding of business as it functions in the world today. More and more emphasis is being placed on research.

The educational processes used have changed materially. The old lecture method for which we had such high regard a generation ago has almost disappeared. In its place are such techniques as case studies, role-playing, and business simulation.

The content of our retailing curricula is developed within the framework of the objectives described, the area needs, the resources of the community, and faculty involvement and indoctrination.

Our problem in retailing education today is the same as that of any professional field. During the past several years, since sputnik, so many people have been extolling the virtues of training in science, mathematics, and liberal arts to the exclusion of professional education that businessmen, among others, are beginning to parrot these remarks without fully understanding what they are saying. Dr. Karen Gillespie of New York University conducted a very interesting survey a few years ago in which she asked businessmen which type of college curricula they would like for retailing people to pursue, and they spoke out overwhelmingly in favor of liberal arts; yet, in a part of the same survey, when they were asked which specific areas they would like for the students to be trained, the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the professional courses which were listed rather than the liberal arts ones.

What we would like to have people recognize is that liberal arts and professional courses are not black and white as they may have been during the 30's and 40's; instead there is a strong blending of the two, and you will find that many of our professional courses are more liberal than many of the academic courses. They have been so strongly meshed that in many instances the classification into one or the other of these two categories would be difficult to make. For effectiveness in training people for the management level, we feel strongly that the liberal arts should constitute a major part of the curriculum in the schools of business administration. But we further believe that the learning can be strengthened through the opportunity to apply the disciplines learned. This can be done effectively in the environment of business and retailing.