September 26, 2007
MBAs want to make money, shock!
Every now and then, a business professor breaks cover to criticise Masters in Business Administration programmes in US universities. The latest is Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School, whose criticisms are noted this morning in the Wall Street Journal.
George Anders describes it as "unthinkable" for professors to talk down MBA programmes but actually it happens every so often. Henry Mintzberg of McGill University in Montreal is a regular scourge.
Khurana’s argument in his new book From Higher Aims to Hired Hands is that business schools have gone from trying to educate a future generation of leaders to giving their students sufficient grounding in corporate finance for them to rush into banks, hedge funds and private equity firms.
I don’t know enough to judge whether MBA programmes were ever the private sector equivalent of the Kennedy School of government at Harvard. But the one time that I had a chance to examine an MBA programme from close-up, at Wharton School in the early 1990s, it did not strike me that way.
Hedge funds and private equity firms were not the destinations of choice then but the MBA candidates mostly seemed keen to cram in enough to get into a bank or one of the consulting firms.
Perhaps I was missing something.
