Author Alasdair White
Recent reports in Business Week and The Economist suggest that business schools are not as recession-proof as once thought.
But there is more to this than first meets the eye and there are other possible implications – Business Week reported that business school applications (particularly for MBAs but also for undergraduate degrees) have been sliding downwards since the middle of last year. The immediate impulse has been to blame the recession (and it certainly has an impact) but research is showing up a more worrying issue: business schools and particularly the MBAs are seen as being too closely aligned with the thinking that has led to the current recession – and that the degrees being offered are not supplying the skills needed – skills such as thinking and interpreting rather than simply analysing, understanding the range of strategic management rather than focusing on a single school of thought (primarily the ‘positioning school’ as exemplified by Porter et al), developing understanding and intuition rather than being rigidly fixated on economics, mathematics and statistics, and so on.
Given this, perhaps all those involved in undergraduate and graduate management and business education need to have a long hard look at the curriculum they offer and do some serious updating. Research into what is offered in the way of degree subjects and the curriculum for those subjects does suggest that most business or management degrees are offering the same old thing in the same old way and not enough is being done to improve the content and quality of the programmes.
Many students starting their degrees this September will, upon graduating, obtain jobs that have yet to be invented and that will require skills and knowledge that they will not have not been taught. Business schools need to do some serious strategic thinking!
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