The Role of Business Schools in the Financial Crisis
Just read an interesting article on the NYTimes.com, “Is It Time To Retrain Business Schools?” that analyzes how much of a role the teaching at B-schools may have had to do with the current economic collapse.
“Critics of business education have many complaints. Some say the schools have become too scientific, too detached from real-world issues. Others say students are taught to come up with hasty solutions to complicated problems. Another group contends that schools give students a limited and distorted view of their role — that they graduate with a focus on maximizing shareholder value and only a limited understanding of ethical and social considerations essential to business leadership.“
Something that really caught my eye was that: “A study of cheating among graduate students, published in 2006 in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56 percent of all M.B.A. students cheated regularly — more than in any other discipline. The authors attributed that to “perceived peer behavior” — in other words, students believed everyone else was doing it.”
And yet another survey found that b-school students actually felt LESS confident in solving workplace ethical issues during their time in school.
“The challenge for a lot of business schools is how to develop leaders and not managers,” said James Tran, a candidate for an M.B.A. and a master’s in public administration at Harvard.
I never went to business school, so I can’t really say anything negative about it from personal experience, but it’s always been my belief that no matter how much theory you learn in school there isn’t any substitute for real world experience. I’m not saying that one is better than the other, but I do think that overemphasis on one type of learning can really skew your thinking.
