The Hindu Business Line : B-school blues

ONCE again B-schools are in the news. The agonising over them never seems to end. It is easy to divine why this should be so. B-schools are fair game simply because, like Everest, they are there! I have a bit of a suspicion that the commotion they provoke is actually a tribute to the interest they excite and the glamour they possess. Also, willy-nilly, the astronomical compensation their degrees command. It is a kind of love-hate complex.

A recent issue of The Economist brims with bad tidings about them. Although viewed against a longer time-frame and in the international setting, business education continues to be in demand, and schools are sprouting in large numbers in China, Russia and East European countries, the US, accounting for 85 per cent of the world's business degrees (American universities are said to "manufacture" more than a lakh MBAs every year!), is witnessing a downslide in the number wanting to join B-schools by as much as 30 per cent over last year's figure.

It is not the number of the schools or the degrees that is so much at issue as the rising disenchantment with their inherent value and utility. There is, of course, the familiar cribbing about the subjects taught being "vague, shifting, formless" and far removed from real life situations. The Economist article quotes from a book "Managers, not MBAs" criticising the run-of-the-mill schools for training "the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences", for being academic, too concerned with teaching basic practical skills and obsessed with merely imparting an ability to analyse data and invent strategies, overlooking the importance of "zest and intuition".

A far more serious charge is the prevalent rank commercialism of those who run B-schools. They are accused of paying too much attention to the return on their students' investment, for example, and not giving value for money. The result is that ethical and environmental issues go by default and receive scant coverage. Attitudinal surveys of MBA students show that they care less about customer needs, product quality and social goals and more about shareholder value.

No wonder, in some quarters, MBA degrees are dismissed as immaterial for success or earnings in one's career. After all, is it not true that not one of America's most-admired business leaders (Warren Buffett, Herb Kelleher, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Jack Welch and Oprah Winfrey) is an MBA?

B. S. Raghavan