(This article was originally written for "MBA Magazine," a national journal for business students and faculty.)

YOU SEE IT in newspapers, magazines and journals. You see it in articles, interviews, and advertisements. You see it everywhere these days. "Unfortunately, college kids don't even dislike American business--they just ignore it," reads a recent ad in the popular press. Everyone has an opinion about the problem, but no one seems to know just what causes it. Whether through apathy, indifference, or disdain, college students today just don't seem to want to go into business.

Let's take a look through this barrage of panic-ridden oratory and see what facts there are. Why do, or do not, undergraduates at Harvard choose business as a career?

First of all, most students do not think of businessmen as money-hungry capitalists bent on crushing the proletariat. American industry has often served as a convenient scapegoat for the frustrations of campus radicals. But we must not extrapolate from cliches to general feelings of hostility. While radical slogans such as "Dow kills babies," "Boycott Stop and Shop," and "Chase Manhattan advocates white racism" mobilize middle-class sentiment against the Vietnam war, exploitation of the grape workers, and South African apartheid, they are but manifestations of a highly active and vocal minority. The radical cause on campus seeks easy targets, and they are sometimes justified, but to generalize from their criticisms to "all students hate business" is absurd.

Students' Roles

Business has recently launched a huge advertising campaign to convince students that it is, indeed, socially and morally conscious. "Thus it is that General Electric Company stresses its role in the fight against air pollution (it builds filtering systems), that Westinghouse Electric Company tells students and others about its work in running a Job Corps Center, and that Corn Products Company asks for '100 college graduates who realize that hunger is the most urgent problem in the world today,' an article explains. This is necessary, but hardly sufficient. Liberal-minded undergraduates are certainly concerned with the "social conscience" and the need to contribute to society, but when it comes to choosing a career there are far more important, and more personal, facts to be considered. Students are more concerned with their own roles in their careers than with vague generalities about the social conscience of business. No matter how socially responsible business may be, students will not enter it if they are convinced that they will have little personal responsibility.

Further confusing business's image is the problem of semantics. A poll of student attitudes on business might be significantly altered by the choice of words used to describe the business function. A small misunderstanding between business and students might be magnified by an image suggested by a poor choice of words. I have been using the word "business," and even--or especially--this word brings to mind the stereotyped image that the American business community is so worried about. The problem lies in the role of the manager, for that is the name applied to those who engage in the study of business, and it is on this level that most students must make a career choice.

All right, what exactly are the statistics? At Harvard a once downward trend in the numbers of those planning on business as a career and those attending graduate business school has been reversed of late. More students every year are going into business from the "better" colleges. Enrollment in business curricula in this country jumped 15 per cent in 1965. At the same time, the demands for these people are increasing rapidly, and unfilled demand creates the impression of dwindling supply.

What is even more significant is that education at a liberal Eastern college seems to turn students toward business. Over the past four years 50 to 75 per cent more students came out of Harvard intending business as a career than went in. In addition, many more people are going into business than are going into Business School. Last year, of the 176 graduating Harvard seniors who planned business as their eventual career, only 76 entered Business School this fall. Others took jobs immediately or went into the military service, but a significantly large number entered other graduate studies, notably Law and Arts & Sciences, planning business careers when they get out.

Most students don't have a bad impression of business, and more and more are choosing management as a career. The liberal college experience seems to push people in this direction. Then why the uproar? It seems to boil down to the one legitimate gripe that the business community makes. It claims that not enough students choose management as a career, and that it is the brighter students who shun it. Business says it wants the top of the graduating class to join the managerial ranks, and that it is not getting the top.

Statistically, it is the people who do less well in terms of grades and academic standing who go to Business School and follow other roads to a business career. We can understand this partially by nothing that on this campus most students who go into business engage in extra-curricular activities, spend more time on social life, and are less grade-oriented than the academically-oriented students, who tend to be less suited to business careers anyway. This may well be the case in many circumstances, but it is too easy an explanation to wipe out the basic statistical trend.

The reason for the "brighter" students' lack of interest can be found in the college itself. Although the college environment leads more people into business, it seems to prevent its top students from going in that direction. The college has different effects on different people. Dr. Stanley King, director of the Harvard Student Study, a research project on the effects of the undergraduate experience on personality, finds that many students arrive at Harvard with a set of personality characteristics well-suited to business, but are looking forward to a career in one of the more "glamorous" professions: law, medicine, academia. Finding that there are more things to do in the college community than study, these students allow the college to develop their personalities and turn them away from the purely academic life toward the myriad of social and business activities available to undergraduates.

At the same time, research has indicated that the Harvard experience has a definite effect in turning students from a more "idealistic" outlook on life to a more "pragmatic" one. Brainwork is what is needed to be on the top of the Harvard academic ladder, and these "personality suited" students place other values before a life of brainwork. Thus they slide down the Harvard grade ladder and hence the statistical bias. Admission to business school places less emphasis on high grades than admission to law or medical schools.

What about those left at the top of the academic scale, the so-called brighter students, for whom study and intellectual attainment are most important? The college pushes these "top" people away from business by its very structure. "The reward structure of a good liberal arts college tends to lure the best men toward academic or professional careers," says the Atkinson-Stevens report. This is the first reason why "brighter"--more academically and intellectually motivated--students are avoiding business. Harvard places an optimum reward on academic achievement. The reward-incentive structure is one in which you receive quality of grades commensurate with quality of intellectual output. You use your brain, you get a gold star. In its most extreme case, it is scholarship for scholarship's sake. The college supposedly fosters freedom of thought, inventiveness and use of the intellect. Top students spend their time learning to conceptualize, theorize and philosophize.

Is business going to offer this kind of set-up, this kind of a reward-in-centive structure? It seems obvious that the academic student will turn to the more "academic" professions: professor, researcher, scientist, lawyer--professions which involve freedom of intellectual activity. Furthermore, students are under the impression that business does not offer such intellectual freedom. The academically talented say they will be too constrained, too limited by the management level they are on, too limited to the manipulation of the great technocracy; business involves too much application and too little creative thinking. They feel that the role of manager will not give them rewards in line with their intellectual abilities, that they will not be free to invent and discover. In short, business is not, in their opinion, in line with the way the college has taught them to think.