EDITORIAL: A disservice to all Whartonites

The combination of the four Management concentrations into one hurts many students. Wharton's Undergraduate Student Handbook takes pride in the Sol Snider Entrepreneurial Center, "the oldest center for entrepreneurial studies in the country, and the first to develop a full curriculum in this area." Wharton administrators and faculty spoke with equal enthusiasm when discussing the other three Management concentrations, on multinational, human resources and strategic management skills. The purpose of this focus on the individual programs in the recruitment literature was obviously to convince potential Whartonites of the unique opportunities available at Penn. So for the school to now turn around and announce that the four programs will be combined into one broader Management concentration -- effective this May -- it is doing its current students a great disservice. There is a significant number of students who matriculated here to enter into one of the specialized Management tracts. Those students are now losing out on their desired curriculum. Current students, whether they have officially declared or not, should be allowed to take advantage of the specialized concentrations that existed when they made the decision to come to Penn. Although the change minimally affects upperclassmen, some freshmen and sophomores -- many of whom have yet to be notified of the policy change -- are going to be left without the program that attracted them here in the first place. Administrators should have waited until the class of 2001's arrival to implement the change. The change to a less focused curriculum does not just affect freshmen and sophomores, though. The variety of Management classes will be decreased in conjunction with the move away from specialization, forcing many upperclassmen to find substitute classes to fulfill their concentrations. Regardless of the merits of the decision itself, Wharton is ignoring its students in the execution of the decision. The change in curriculum should not affect current students, many of whom came to Wharton specifically for the specialization that was once a point of pride for the school.