LeTourneau University

Date: Sep 12 2016
Major: Finance (This Major's Salary over time)
LeTourneau overall is a good school, especially if one chooses an engineering or aviation major and does not mind the lack of social life or the isolated campus. I pursued two business majors during a period of change and restructuring within the school of business; I therefore left LETU somewhat jaded and feeling like my money had not been well spent.

During my time at LETU, some good business professors either left the school entirely or taught less frequently as adjuncts or similar. Since the department was already quite small, this resulted in only a handful of professors teaching all the required business classes. Especially in the last two years I spent at LETU, most of my classes were taught by only a few instructors, to the extent that I often had multiple courses with the same professor on a given day. With some professors this was fine, but there were instances where I did not care for a teacher's instruction style or felt that a certain professor was not really teaching relevant material, at which point I was stuck with that same person for multiple classes. One professor I had for multiple classes many semesters, and he focused extremely heavily on research and presenting papers at a major conference, often resulting in a lack of actual classroom instruction. Another professor taught several supposedly-different marketing classes that seemed to cover the exact same material, most of which was common-sense anyway. In short, while I did have several amazing professors who genuinely cared about students' learning, I left LeTourneau with a sense of having spent a lot of money to get varying qualities of instruction from only a handful of individuals.

I am not aware of whether the school of business has hired new professors and re-arranged the curriculum at this point. Another major annoyance of being a business student was the number of classes that I was required to take that were either no longer offered or only offered one semester every two years. My finance degree was phased out and replaced with a generic business degree with a finance concentration—this happened to several other specific degrees, and I feel like this limits a graduate's competitiveness in a job market that looks for people with specific degrees. A finance or accounting degree is what someone with those interests should obtain, not a Business Admin major with a finance or accounting concentration. Thankfully, my degree was grandfathered, but for future students this could be a major concern.

In conclusion, while LeTourneau is a good school academics-wise, my experience with the business department was not satisfactory. Many students do not like the school because of the strict rules and lack of social activities, but this is something that students should research before applying. Hopefully, LETU can organize the business department and transform it into the positive instructional entity it has the potential of becoming.