UC Riverside

Understanding the professional identity of senior-level undergraduate business students may shed light on the rampant unethical acts of business managers in industry. Business education is the largest segment of undergraduate majors, constituting more than 20% of students in four-year institutions, year after year. To explain the professional identity of business students, this study uses prior theoretical frameworks to model the precursors of professionalism--"autonomy of judgment," "desire for expertise," "self-concept," and "social agency." The study draws on data from the College Senior Survey (CSS) collected by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) at UCLA for two academic years 2006-2008. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis indicate that the four factors--autonomy of judgment, desire for expertise, self-concept, and social agency--indeed fit a cohesive model for the latent construct "precursors of professionalism." The results suggest that there are statistically significant differences between business and non-business majors for three of the four factors tested in the study: "desire for expertise," "self-concept," and "social agency." This indicates that business students differ from their peers in college in most of the dimensions of the precursors of professionalism.