Bulldoze the business school

Bulldoze the business school
theguardian.com

It’s not that they need to be bulldozed, but rather, treated as a trade school.

Our highest rated classes were taught by practitioners - those in the Arena, leading men and women, making the difficult ethical choices, then posing them to us to wrestle through. These were the classes we all wanted to take, but were deeply oversubscribed and only a fraction of us got to take.

The practitioners were sidelined by the academics. The theorists and mere paper-writers - many of whom either utterly failed at business or never spent a day outside the university environment.

Not one of my MBA classmates planned to teach - yet we spent most of our required class time being taught by those in power with the least relevance to the real world.

The real revolution in business education will occur when the academics relinquish control, and let those who’ve learned through hard fought experience take the reins.

My experience was incredible - my classmates were the most impressive folks I’ve ever met. And the value there was incalculable. But the education was easily replicable, aside from the phenomenal courses taught by practitioners.

The points he makes are mostly valid. Not sure if he mentioned this one, though:

The existence of business schools gives society the unjustified idea that there are positions for which business graduates are better suited than most other people.

To compare, medical schools do the same but it is justified.

I wouldn't have surgery performed on me by someone who hadn't been to medical school, but I would be indifferent to hiring a manager who hadn't gone to business school. (One interesting line of thought I did learn at business school was that in the Germanic world, they are less likely to accept the Anglo-Saxon view that management is a separate skill to working. So they get more people stepping up from the ranks.)

So why do I think this? When I studied the business school, it was just very weak intellectually. Kinda like watching documentaries all day; interesting, makes you think you understand something, but ultimately superficial. Reading about Betamax vs VHS is the same; you think you're gaining insight as you do it, but there's nothing really deep in there. There's not really a method or organising principle to decision making, other than "try to think about it in an organized way, keeping in mind relevant precedents" (like SWOT). Basically just common sense as a degree.

That's mostly the strategy part I'm addressing there, which is probably the piece most people associate with business school.

The other parts are also better taught by other departments. Finance can get very interesting when it comes to derivatives and investment strategies, but you're never going to learn this without having a strong applied math background. Organization behaviour and Human Resource Management, there are scientific departments that reach into the same space. Again, there's a big gap between what we can learn about human psychology and how you should use that information practically.

Worst of all is the philosophical angle. So many times I thought to myself "how do you actually know this" with very little answer.

If you want to learn how to solve business problems, there is a course that is uniquely suited for this. Software Engineering. You look at business problems, look at what resources you have available, see how other people solved them (hashmap, quicksort), and cook up your own solution using the same tools that professionals use (git, IDEs, terminals).

Now it seems the higher level degree status is used to game visa applications.

Maybe a MBA should only be issued if you can prove 10 or 15 years real world work experience which would return the MBA to its roots as a course for experienced people

I would add a further element of uncertainty, that applies not specifically to business schools only but to a number of schools/universities.

The professors/dean/etc. may control what is taught at the university, but rarely they can control what the students actiually learn.

If the student perceives the degree as a mere requirement for entry into a career, he/she will not study to learn, he/she will study to pass the exams, which is not at all the same thing and learn and participate as little as possible.

If this is the case, there is no real incentive to teach "better" or teach "more", and what is taught little by little starts diverging from what the industry expects from a graduate, reinforcing the feeling (IMHO correct nowadays) that the degree is just a sort of badge to allow the entry to the club.

The job market however insists on asking these qualificatons even for jobs where they make no sense whatsoever, fueling this perverse mechanism.