International business is the most popular undergraduate major at Rollins College, an 1,800-student liberal arts college in Winter Park, Florida.

Globalizing the Undergraduate Curriculum: International Business at Rollins

A few things stand out immediately as unusual about Rollins College’s undergraduate international business program. The first is the required international experience. The second is the required internship. And the third is the required language competency—at least four courses in a modern language other than English taken at the intermediate or advanced level. But the main difference between Rollins’ international business program and many other institutions’ undergraduate programs, says Rollins international business professor Don Rogers, is the emphasis: on international, rather than business.

Rollins set up its program more than ten years ago to focus on the competencies students would need for a rapidly globalizing world. In the time since, faculty and staff have refined the program to help provide students with a business worldview that by definition extends beyond national borders—“international” as the standard mode for business education, not as a special case.

Competencies for Learning

In the mid-1990s, Rogers and his colleagues at Rollins began revamping Rollins’ existing undergraduate business program. The goals—to differentiate Rollins’ program from the many other undergraduate business programs, and to focus on excellence and applied learning—fit naturally with one of Rollins’ existing strengths: international education. The college, a private liberal arts institution in Winter Park, Florida, with an enrollment of about 1,800 in its undergraduate College of Arts and Sciences division, started focusing on international education in the 1930s, and already had established internship and education centers in London and Shanghai, as well as study abroad programs in Spain, Germany, and Australia. “We wanted to build a business program that would really take advantage of other areas of strength at Rollins. We wanted to tap into the foreign language departments, and all the courses already taught on campus focusing on contemporary cultures in other countries,” Rogers explains. Faculty also designed the program to focus on applied learning. “We shifted the focus of business courses away from simple content and toward using that content to develop the skills students would need for the business world,” he says.

Two sets of competencies are the foundation of Rollins’ international business (INB) program. The first set contains the “building blocks” of any business education: concepts of the profession; technical skills like accounting, marketing, management, and finance; integrative skills like problem-solving; and career marketability. The second set of competencies contains the learning outcomes found in a traditional liberal arts education: communication skills, critical thinking, social and personal responsibility, leadership and adaptability, and others. The “introductory” level courses in the INB program include language studies, an international elective, area studies, and international business courses, exposing students to global business concepts from their first semester in the program.

“In a typical undergraduate business curriculum, students read the book, discuss, and take the test,” Rogers says. “Here, students read the book; then, in a group, for purposes of developing collaborative skills, they put together a presentation. That helps them develop argument and presentation skills. Then they present in class. Lots of graduate business schools do this kind of thing, pedagogically. Our students do a lot of presentations, and they get very good at it.”

So good at it, in fact, that Rollins student regularly report back that they’re ahead of their peers in the workplace when it comes to making presentations in front of a group. “Anecdotally, we hear a lot about the advantages our approach gives students when they leave Rollins,” Rogers said. One student, who Rogers describes as “above average, but not the very best” at spreadsheet analysis, went to work at a financial institution and found that he was suddenly the resident expert at spreadsheets. The student ended up helping to train many of his colleagues. “Our students frequently tell us they’re feeling really confident on the job while other people are just learning,” Rogers says.

Students in Rollins’ international business program are required to demonstrate proficiency in a language other than English by graduation.

Putting the International in International Business

Business does not mean the same thing in the United States as it does in other countries, says Sharon Agee, director of the international business internship program and a Rollins international business instructor, and she wants Rollins students to be prepared for careers in which non-American perspectives and institutions play a prominent role. “All of our courses have a global focus,” Agee says. “If I’m teaching marketing, we take into consideration the culture of the country and the people who would buy the product.”  While the traditional curriculum might emphasize that “finance is universal,” Rollins professors want their students to recognize that finance in North America is different from finance in Africa. 

One way students can learn these types of lessons is through immersion in a foreign culture—both the business and nonbusiness aspects, says Rollins international business professor Cecilia McInnis-Bowers. Every Rollins INB student is required to have an international experience, as well as an international-business-related internship (foreign or domestic). Students have many options to fulfill the international experience requirement, through the Rollins study abroad office or on their own, and an endowment helps provide funding for students who might not otherwise afford international travel, McInnis-Bowers says.

A large number of Rollins INB students—about 80 percent—choose Spanish as their second language, and German and Chinese are also popular. Rollins has study abroad programs in China, Spain, and Germany, but requiring a second language and an international experience are not the only ways the college has globalized the undergraduate business curriculum. Students sometimes combine their international experience and internship, providing an in-depth period of language and business immersion in a foreign country, Agee says. This summer, McInnis-Bowers will take a group of students to Costa Rica for an international business class and homestay experiences with local families, and some of the students will stay in Costa Rica to complete internships after the course in organizations like the U.S. Department of Commerce.  

Rollins will not waive or exempt any student who does not have proficiency in English and another foreign language from its four-course upper-level language requirement, and those students who do come to Rollins with second-language proficiency must take four additional “area studies” courses instead. While the language requirement at Rollins is rigorous, it doesn’t discourage most interested students from pursing the INB major, McInnis-Bowers says. They tend to understand that fluency in a foreign language will set them apart from others when they reach the workplace or graduate school.  One student, who interned at an international assets management firm, told the story of how her language skills allowed her to step in at a time of crisis. An important e-mail had arrived from a South American client, and the only broker fluent in Spanish was on vacation. “I offered my assistance, even though I was very nervous, and translated the e-mail for them,” the student wrote in her post-internship report. “It is almost essential to know as many languages as you can, because the world is becoming very interconnected.”

Ultimately, the places where the liberal arts and the business world intersect provide the best opportunities for student learning, faculty members say. “In addition to teaching the economic responsibilities of a business, the responsibilities toward customers, we teach that you also have a responsibility to be a citizen of your community and your country, to give back for all the intangible benefits you get,” Rogers says. “That’s not part of typical business thinking. But it is part of our thinking here at Rollins.”

For more information about Rollins’ undergraduate international business program, visit the program Web page. For information about AAC&U’s work on global education, see the Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility project Web page.