B.A. vs. B.S. in Business: The Surprising Choice That Could Make or Break Your Career
Some colleges and universities offer both kinds of undergraduate business degrees and some offer only one, so deciding between a B.A. and a B.S. is one of the first decisions you’ll have to make when choosing a school. Here are the differences, the benefits, and the drawbacks of one degree over the other.
Bachelor of Arts in Business
A Bachelor of Arts in Business provides a broad business education that also includes a variety of classes in the liberal arts. As with a Bachelor of Science, you’d select a major in management, marketing, finance, or another business school concentration. But in addition you would supplement the coursework that the major mandates with required and elective credits in the social sciences (psychology, sociology, history, and political science, for example), humanities (philosophy, literature, art, music, and the like), and languages. In other words, with a B.A. you graduate with a wider base of knowledge about the world in general than you’re likely to gain with a B.S. degree. While not as tightly focused on business, a B.A. gives you an understanding of other subjects that are useful for a lifetime, whether or not they’re explicitly applicable to the career you have in mind. (If you haven’t had the revelation by now, though, you can be pretty much assured that nothing you learn is ever wasted.)
