His point about the declining value of business school in particular is nominally sound, but he pinpoints the wrong source of the problem.
The problem with business school is that it's started seeing itself in competition with law school, and accordingly, it's started focusing on younger and younger candidates. Average ages of first-year MBA students have been getting younger, especially at the top-tier programs like HBS and Stanford.
This is, quite frankly, defeating the original purpose of business school: to be a finishing school, and not a preparatory school. Back in the day, you got an MBA because you had learned a thing or two in your work experience, and would like to reflect on it through the prism of various frameworks, theories, and leaders. But it was critical that you had an empirical knowledge base to work with, or else the lessons were vague and meaningless. The topics demanded practical knowledge of the general subject.
Today, b-school is trying to position itself as an entry vehicle into the working world. You graduate, you go to b-school, you learn some mumbo-jumbo about how this whole working world -- which you've never experienced -- is supposed to work. And then you get sent off into that world, ready to be an entitled prick and piss off everyone around you who has actually experienced the real thing. People who will laugh at your frameworks and your theories, because they've heard them from the last 20,000 MBAs who came before you.
B-school can still be relevant in today's business world, and in the business world of the future. But it needs to decide what it wants to be. And, whatever that is, it should be something more than simply an alternative to law school for 22-to-25-year-olds.
"Today, b-school is trying to position itself as an entry vehicle into the working world."
I do think there needs to be something that fills this position though. I think the ideal would be for b-school to work more like BYU or a salmon farm, e.g.
* Students show up straight out of undergrad and learn for 3 - 4 months.
* Students start their own project and work on it for another 4 - 6 months.
* Students apply to Y Combinator or one of the other seed accelerators, and continue building out their business over the next two years.
* Students who have shipped something significant are then allowed to come back at any point between two and ten years later.
I do think there needs to be something that fills this position though.
It doesn't even necessarily have to be that complex. What's wrong with:
1. Graduate with a bachelor's degree
2. Work for 2-3 years
3. Go back to school with practical experience
I think this would be a good model for all post-undergraduate educations (not just professional ones like business, or law). A few years of seasoning out in the field does everyone good.
Do you mean the way most male BYU students go on missions in the middle of undergrad, then finish older? Because 999 out of 1000 times, the mission has nothing to do with their field of education. Or was it something else?
"Do you mean the way most male BYU students go on missions in the middle of undergrad, then finish older?"
Yes. Not a perfect comparison as you point out, but that seems like roughly the right model. That way you have some mentors and a network you can tap into while you're building your first business, as well as some basic knowledge to get you started.
What if in general there were an option for higher education that was more spread out?
I'm imagining a system that is more based on apprenticeship; where you work and you learn at the same time, and after a certain number of years, you have taken enough classes to be given a degree in some area.
I guess the idea would be to have a company that is also an accredited university (with professors who do research and publish papers and stuff). I've decided to call this a companiversity.
Lets pretend it is a software companiversity. I guess the idea is that you just hire the best students right out of high-school, and they agree to work for you and you pay them to work on various contracts that the companiversity takes (presumably less than someone with a degree).
They also get to take classes at your internal university and earn a degree for free. The overhead that it costs the university to administer classes is paid for by the products that they delivered.
I guess the idea is to eliminate the huge amount of debt that college students accrue, return some of the opportunity-cost loss that college students experience by not entering the workforce, and give students that are entering technical professions some semblance of experience to increase their market value once they leave.
What if in general there were an option for higher education that was more spread out?
This is how most higher ed actually works out in practice. Where I grew up in Minnesota at least 50% of students at the U of MN worked and went to school part time and took 6-8 years to get a degree.
Though they have an employment rate that's on par or worse than us, Europe has more apprenticeship, training type programs. I wonder if there's less of a stigma in their societies against vocational programs.
I really don't think that's true. I started my MBA at Carnegie Mellon when I was 20. Having been in the workforce for a number of years now, I don't think I would have gotten anything much else out of it on the academic side had I started later. The one thing I might have missed out on to a degree by going so young is the networking. I tended to spend a lot more time outside of class with undergrad students who were my own age. That being said I'm still happy I went when I did.
Your comment is exactly correct -- you wouldn't have gotten anything more on the academic side, but you missed out on the networking. Speaking from my MBA experience, the networking was 95-99% of the value.
For clarification: are you referring to your MBA or to an undergraduate business degree? If you were in a graduate program at 20, then you're probably an outlier (in a good way!) to begin with. If you're talking about undergraduate-level business major or focus, then I think that's a different animal altogether -- and should be treated as such.
My biggest concern with the MBA (master's level) right now is that it's converging too much on the same territory and same age group as the undergraduate business curriculum. There is absolutely a lot of value in an undergraduate business curriculum, but it should be fundamentally different from the curriculum at the graduate level. The fact that the two curricula are very similar right now is indicative of a problem, IMO.
You bring up a good point that the undergrad and graduate curriculums should probably be different. However, they need to offer intro classes for the majority of subjects because most students won't know accounting and finance even if they've been in the working world for awhile beforehand. I think the clear advantage to the graduate program is that you can study only business. While I suppose I can have more intelligent conversations with other college-educated folk because I had to read Kant, Bentham, etc., I wouldn't mind having skipped all those philosophy classes in undergrad. There are also more advanced classes in the graduate business curriculum. I'm not sure what it is exactly about the curriculum that you see as problematic or would suggest changing.
Nothing's wrong with the curriculum on a nominal level. It's all well and good. The problem is that you can much more fully appreciate the material when you've had an empirical base from which to view it. As we know, 99% of the best-laid plans in the business world come down, in the end, to politics. That's something you could imagine, but probably wouldn't really grok, until you'd been out in the wild and brushed up against the subject.
Another example: the people. I learned a lot from my classmates at my MBA program, but that's probably because a lot of them had different professional backgrounds. If we were all the same -- no backgrounds yet, other than our majors in undergrad and perhaps some college internships -- then I'd question what these people would actually have to teach me, or me them.
I'd love to see the graduate business program be a lot more selective on the basis of actual leadership experience or actual business results. Select for the people who've kicked some ass in the real world. Then make the program super peer-focused, and make the whole thing basically the Hogwarts of business badassery. A bunch of super-accomplished people getting together and, for lack of a better word, hacking business.
The theories and frameworks are great, but to your point, I think a lot of that stuff is undergrad material. Or maybe core/primer/refrsher material in the graduate program.
Is that taught using the "case" method? What exactly did you say in case studies when experienced managers were talking? </curious> Because an MBA is as much about learning from fellow students as it is from professors.
We did do some case studies, but probably fewer than at other schools. Having limited management experience really had no effect on my ability to participate in case studies or in class though. I was still just as able to argue that a company should have used a loss leader strategy instead of cost-plus pricing, or argue why a certain market would be winner-take-all resulting in a natural monopoly, or that another student's argument ignored the price inelasticity of the product. None of these things require that you have actually implemented them yourself in order to have a good grasp of the concepts.
The problem with business school is that it's started seeing itself in competition with law school, and accordingly, it's started focusing on younger and younger candidates. Average ages of first-year MBA students have been getting younger, especially at the top-tier programs like HBS and Stanford.
This is, quite frankly, defeating the original purpose of business school: to be a finishing school, and not a preparatory school. Back in the day, you got an MBA because you had learned a thing or two in your work experience, and would like to reflect on it through the prism of various frameworks, theories, and leaders. But it was critical that you had an empirical knowledge base to work with, or else the lessons were vague and meaningless. The topics demanded practical knowledge of the general subject.
Today, b-school is trying to position itself as an entry vehicle into the working world. You graduate, you go to b-school, you learn some mumbo-jumbo about how this whole working world -- which you've never experienced -- is supposed to work. And then you get sent off into that world, ready to be an entitled prick and piss off everyone around you who has actually experienced the real thing. People who will laugh at your frameworks and your theories, because they've heard them from the last 20,000 MBAs who came before you.
B-school can still be relevant in today's business world, and in the business world of the future. But it needs to decide what it wants to be. And, whatever that is, it should be something more than simply an alternative to law school for 22-to-25-year-olds.