What's Really Wrong With U.S. Business Schools?

What's Really Wrong With U.S. business schools?
http://chronicle.com/prm/daily/2005/08/2005080801n.htm

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Abstract:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=766404

 

Law schools are also often accused of manipulating their admissions statistics and such in order to improve their rankings.

 

As nosbourne just said, rankings affect every discipline, not just business. Also, that thing about B-schools constantly changing their curriculum... I think that's probably a good thing. Business is not like Chemistry or Classics. Every few years there's some hot new trend that everyone wants to use, and then a few years later nobody bothers with it anymore. I think the only parts that stay the same are 1) analytic areas in which business intersects with economics 2) unchanging cliches that are too simple to study, but you have to study them anyway, e.g. "the timing of decisions is very important".

 

It's interesting that European media periodically feature articles about what's wrong with British (or whatever it happens to be) business schools. Those articles often include worries about how they are falling behind the Americans, how American B-schools produce better managers, are better funded or whatever the argument happens to be. So self-criticism is probably universal the world around and the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

 

A cynic might say the same thing about management itself.

While people ranging from R&D scientists and engineers down to the people who answer the phones actually create products and serve customers, the suits always seem to be trying to solve problems by redrawing organizational charts, by promoting trendy management fads and by public relations efforts. I guess that's why they deserve their obscene compensation packages.

My point is that in both cases content seems to be subordinated to form.

 

You can still get something done if you can work around their schemes.