This is more than a few weeks old now, but there was a Q&A with Jeffrey Garten, who was at the time stepping down as Dean of the Yale School of Management.
Q. Do you feel that in your 10 years, you were able to improve the way business students are educated?
A. Ten years ago, the role of business in society was on an upward trajectory. There was a sense that business leaders would be the champions of globalization and would in fact fill in where governments had left a huge vacuum in terms of the rules of the world economy. Today, that seems like a very fanciful notion. Post 9/11 and post Enron, the role of business leaders has been enormously diminished. It's been an enormous challenge to have an impact on business education because the ground has shifted so dramatically. I have been enormously humbled by the task. It's extremely difficult to figure out what to teach in a two-year course, to reflect today's realities, let alone what the world will look like 10 or 20 years from now when the graduates reach their stride in terms of their careers.
Q. Is this challenge confronting all business school deans?
Technorati Tags: MBA, business school, Yale
A. I'm sure this confronts all the deans. The real question is how to be relevant. What do you teach about corporate governance when the rules and the expectations of society are changing so quickly? What do you teach about the global competitive landscape when countries like China and India are likely to fundamentally reorganize the way production and trade are conducted? I was an investment banker for 15 years. I was in four presidential administrations. But this job has been the most difficult of all.
Q. Are you a critic of how your own students have been educated?
A. I think the current model of business school education needs to change dramatically. I think there should be different criteria for tenuring faculty. Right now, a professor would get tenure on the same qualifications as he or she would if they were in a department of economics or a department of history. What business schools need to do is add some criteria for promotion. One of them should be some real-world experience, in the same way that a doctor teaching at a medical school would have had to see patients.
Q. What percentage of business school professors have had experience in real companies?
A. I would say it's minuscule. This is a very radical proposal. But let me give you a second. Business schools need to have a two-track faculty, with the second track being a clinical faculty, that is, people who may not have the academic qualifications to get tenure or even do real academic research, but who would bring into the classroom the world of practice and experience.
Q. What else would you say has to change?
A. Business schools need to rethink the way they're preparing students to operate in a global economy. There's a lot of lip service to this and no end to courses that have the word "international" in front of the name. But the fact is that most business schools are quite insular. I think there's a strong case for mergers between American schools and schools abroad. Not episodic exchange programs. Not an occasional exchange of professors. But a global school that matches a global market. A school in which the students can go back and forth between the United States and China and where the professors are rotated. No business school is even close to approaching that degree of global focus.
I've wrestled with the idea of business school, and for better or for worse, I've chosen not to take that path. I may change my mind, or I may get a graduate degree in the future, not in business, but Garten brings up a number of issues that I have with the MBA experience.
If you're looking to change careers, or get into a career that expects an MBA (finance, for example) then it may be absolutely the right decision.
What I am looking for is something that doesn't exist, if Garten is as disappointed with the marketplace for business education as he says he is.
Are Business Schools Failing the World? [nytimes.com]
While I think Dean Garten's comments are true for a lot of the entrenched, "top name" business schools, my sense is that there are a lot of smaller, niche schools that are much more freer and experimental with their curriculums (for example: see how Thunderbird had, in a short time, made such a name for its "international business" focus). And even top name schools are getting into the act; see the University of Michigan's Global MBA (taught in Korea, Japan, and the US) and IMAP projects, for one example; and that most schools do have exchange programs for students with European or Asian schools.
So students looking for international experiences can get them. Garten's remarks on the faculties are generally dead on, though.