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Originally Posted by hochfelder

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On the other hand, it has been described by many authors in detail by now the drinking ritual in which students at Wharton visit 10 bars in one night. This is what happens in business schools, after all, most students simply get drunk. MBA students bond and network. At Stanford learning is not an explicit goal. Grade inflation is pervasive in top schools, thus almost no one fails out of these programs, which means the credential does not serve as a screen or an enforcement of minimum competency standards. [...]

Business schools have built a weird, almost unimaginable design for MBA-level education that distorts students into critters with lopsided brains, icy hearts, and shrunken souls. The management schools research is fuzzy, irrelevant, and pretentious, not to mention that business schools appeal to one another as scholarly communities through a plethora of academic journals that are utterly divorced from the challenges of everyday management. At the same time, unlike other professions such as medicine, law, architecture, and even business schools of the distant past (and a few today that employ more clinical faculty), many full-time faculty have not practiced the profession or craft of management. The shortage of faculty means more business schools are hiring from social science departments such as economics, psychology, or sociology. These faculty, who derive power from their scarcity, are able to focus importance on disciplinary-based research and publication in traditional scholarly journals, rather than emphasizing managerial concerns. Therefore, faculty who have been hired and promoted for their theoretical and analytical skills and for their ability to generate and, one might hope, impart knowledge are not as able to apply the knowledge that they teach.

What's worse is that we have a self-reinforcing system that will be difficult to change. The most prestigious schools attract the best students who have the best job opportunities and the highest salaries and attract the highest status recruiters. Because the status of the schools derives in part from the achievements of their graduates, those that obtain the best students retain their prestige. Schools that win in this status-based competition, and for that matter, their students, have little incentive to change. Schools that have an incentive to innovate, the ones that are newer or for other reasons are interested in experimenting with different models of MBA education, begin with the disadvantage of not necessarily being able to attract the most applicants or the best students, and therefore, are not as attractive to corporate recruiters.

For the most part, there is scant evidence that the MBA credential, particularly from non-elite schools, or the grades earned in business courses -- a measure of the mastery of the material -- are related to either salary or the attainment of higher level positions in organizations. These data, at a minimum, suggest that the training or education component of business education is only loosely coupled to the world of managing organizations.