Degrees In Business Blog

When looking at degrees for the business world, some degrees are rather obvious: general business for the well-rounded professional; marketing for advertising skills; administrations for management; human resources for, well, human resources; and English or communications for copy. Even IT & engineering degrees are self-explanatory.

But what’s geographic information systems?

At American Sentinel University, the geographic information systems, or GIS, program prepares the student for the use of databases the include spatial data. It’s useful for online map services, such as connecting residential and business directory information to a road map, and is specifically meant to help users to plot the shortest route from A to B. Think Mapquest, Google Maps, and your GPS system.

[caption id="attachment_266" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Did this business degree student go to a business school or university?"][/caption]

What’s the difference between business schools and universities?

Business schools offer strictly business degree programs, in the form of BBAs (Bachelor of Business Administration) and MBAs (Master of Business Administration.) They sometimes requre the GMAT to apply.

Universities offer a wide variety of programs, from business degrees to criminal justice degrees to social work degrees. Universities sometimes require the SAT as part of the application process. Undergraduate programs are known as BAs (Bachelor of Arts) or BSs (Bachelor of Science), while master degrees are known as MAs (Master of Arts), MSs (Master of Science), or MBAs (Master of Business Administrations).

There’s a negative stereotype surrounding business these days that really must be purged from American business; things that business men and business students do like hacking into school files that should not be corrupting today’s already-struggling economy.

The terms “family man” and “business man” are coined as polar opposites, as if a professional career means the abandonment of other core values in societal human beings. Like the horror scenes straight out of The Devil Wears Prada, business forces us to choose between: our friends and our job; our professional progress and our family; our career success and our morals.

But this isn’t the way business has to be. Ethical business degrees, particularly ethical MBA programs, are cropping up from the crevices of our colleges and universities to bring the best of both worlds under one umbrella. Through these “ethical MBAs,” business professionals may establish fruitful careers on top of a foundation of education that interweaves ethics into each and every class, instead of that one estranged ethics course that was jam-packed into the General Eds.

The question becomes, then: how do these ethical business degrees hold up to the actual wear-and-tear of the business world?