Printer-friendly versionThe Business, Entrepreneurship and Liberal Learning (BELL) project is a three-year effort to determine how educators can help ensure that undergraduate students who major in business and other professional fields also gain the benefits of a strong liberal arts education.
The BELL project was developed in response to the fact that increasing numbers of undergraduates are majoring in professional fields, particularly business, and disproportionate numbers of those students are the first in their families to go to college. Unless the central goals of a liberal arts education are integrated with their educational experiences in professional disciplines, these students will be deprived of a broad education that prepares them for leadership in their work, and they will not gain the intellectual, moral, and civic learning they need to be responsible individuals and members of their communities.
Leaders in business as well as higher education have long stressed the importance of the key goals of a liberal arts education. The central problem that will be addressed is that on most college campuses students majoring in professional fields are required to take a few courses from scores of offerings in the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences, but no effort is made to integrate the aims of the liberal arts with the aims of professional education.
The project will investigate promising approaches to achieving this integration in many different kinds of colleges and universities around the country. It builds on prior Carnegie Foundation work, including studies of professional preparation in higher education, of ethical and social responsibility as educational goals, and of integrative learning in undergraduate education.
In addition to Carnegie, current funders include the Teagle Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and the Skoll Foundation.
