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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.
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At Harvard there is not the degree of rigorous classroom discussion that entering students envision. They near graduation especially cognuzant of the school's pedigree as they navigate the frigid waters of the job market. The school has a strong alumni network and its name has currency in the real world. But an MBA holder cannot — and should not — write his own ticket these days.
There is grade inflation at Harvard and other top schools. Hey, if it can happen at Harvard, this should come as no surprise that it happens elsewhere. According to the typical student's transcript, he has an GPA worthy of magna cum laude honors. While students study extremely hard, there are some techniques and concepts they have simply not mastered. They remember times — be it in their corporate finance or statistics classes — when they were clearly baffled by exam questions, but they get an A for the semester nonetheless. In real terms, after they subtract out (grade) inflation, they know they probably earned a B+. I know there are other hardworking MBA candidates across the country getting the similar kid glove treatment from their professors, and that sends the wrong message.
In February 2002, an op-ed by University of California-Irvine professor Peter Navarro rallied for a standards exam for MBAs, akin to the bar exam for lawyers or a CPA for accountants. While business can often be more art than science, subjects like finance and business law do have industry-accepted principles that can be tested. MBAs could certainly benefit from an all-encompassing certification exam before setting out to conquer a boardroom. As it is now, so few MBAs share the same body of knowledge that employers place a premium on school prestige.
Before a standards movement can gain momentum, business schools have to give some power back to professors, who right now are scared to death of receiving negative reviews from students. B-schools also have to get out from under a trade press ranking system that evaluates them more like competing college football teams than sure-footed institutions producing the nation's next managerial class.
In the meantime, here is a handy formula for employers looking to hire an MBA this season. Consider it a discount rate for obtaining the net present value of the degree. It goes like this: Take a graduate's GPA and discount it by 15%. Take his elite school tag and discount it by a further 10%, then make him an offer based as much on his pre-MBA work experience than his coursework. If the graduate rejects your company's offer, his decision may have had more to do with hefty loan repayments than his believing he is overqualified.