What kind of new talent do we need in business today? How can we best prepare young citizens to participate in democracy? And how can undergraduate business education best equip students for their roles as both managers and citizens?

These questions are at the heart of The Aspen Undergraduate Business Education Consortium.  With business now the most popular major in the U.S., business education critics and advocates alike are exploring how business education can do what liberal learning arguably does best—enable students to make sense of the world and their place in it, and prepare them to engage responsibly with the life of their times.

Over the course of the Consortium (through March 2013), teams from forty colleges and universities will share specific curricular and co-curricular ideas that tie the liberal arts and business training together in ways that resonate for today’s students – and for their employers.  The Consortium also has a strong action learning component: as part of participation, each school is taking on a pilot project that attempts to further the integration of liberal learning and business education.

The Consortium is convened in partnership with Anne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich and William M. Sullivan – three lead authors on Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession (Jossey-Bass/Wiley, 2011).

Please visit our Undergraduate Network Portal on our website, Caseplace.org for related reading and teaching materials.

Seed funding for the Consortium was provided by The Teagle Foundation and Carnegie Corporation of New York.

First Convening: March 19-20, 2012 at The George Washington University School of Business in Washington, D.C.

• Agenda
• Participant List
• Report

Second Convening: March 10-12, 2013 at the University of Denver, Daniels College of Business.

• Agenda
• Participant List

About the Teagle Foundation

The Teagle Foundation provides leadership for liberal education, mobilizing the intellectual and financial resources that are necessary if today's students are to have access to a challenging and transformative liberal education. The Foundation's commitment to such education includes its grantmaking to institutions of higher education across the country, its long-established scholarship program for the children of employees of ExxonMobil, and its work helping economically disadvantaged young people in New York City -- where the Foundation is based -- gain admission to college and succeed once there.

About Carnegie Corporation of New York

Carnegie Corporation of New York is a philanthropic foundation created by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to do "real and permanent good in this world."

For more information about the Consortium please contact, Claire Preisser at claire.preisser@aspeninstitute.org