VideoThe most commercially wounding criticisms are those that appear to contradict the claim that an MBA enhances career prospects. There was uproar when, two years ago, Mr Pfeffer and Christina Fong argued in Academy of Management Learning and Education that there was little evidence that getting an MBA had much effect on a graduate's salary or career. "Usually it just makes you a couple of years older than non-MBA peers," one source told them.
Of course, business schools may be important mainly as a screening mechanism — their basic skill may be choosing students, not teaching them. Once in, and the vast bill paid, few are ever thrown out for failing their exams even though, as Mr Pfeffer and Ms Fong mischievously point out, they are much more likely to cheat than students in other disciplines.
Moreover, business schools certainly work extremely hard — much harder than other educational institutions — at getting their students into the job market. They employ squads of recruiters. Harvard, for instance, has 17 full-time staff and 24 part-time counsellors to help 900 students find glamorous jobs. Even if the school taught students nothing, they would still be buying the finest job marketing imaginable.
A different complaint is that business schools fail to teach their students the right things. The strongest advocate of this view is Henry Mintzberg, a professor at Canada's McGill University. In "Managers Not MBAs", a new book, he argues that conventional MBA courses offer "specialised training in the functions of business, not general educating in the practice of management". Their students are often too young and inexperienced to learn skills that, in any case, are often easier to acquire in the workplace than sitting in a classroom. "Conventional MBA programmes train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences," he complains. They ignore the extent to which management is a craft, requiring zest and intuition rather than merely an ability to analyse data and invent strategies.
Maybe that is why, as Mr Mintzberg gleefully points out, a list of America's most-admired business leaders (Warren Buffett, Herb Kelleher, Michael Dell, Bill Gates, Jack Welch and Oprah Winfrey) contains not a single MBA. And that is in spite of the fact that a growing proportion of chief executives, at least in America, now has an MBA. A study by the Leadership Initiative at Harvard Business School found that about 10% of America's chief executives or founders of large companies had an MBA in the 1960s, compared with almost 60% in the 1990s. Some business schools seem to be trying to meet such criticisms. They have launched new courses that encourage students to learn to collaborate with each other and work in teams; they offer executive coaching rather than just lecturing; they create ambitious new courses in leadership. All are attempts to bridge the gap between the academic classroom on the one hand and the more practical, hands-dirty approach of commercial management development.
Roughly the reverse of Mr Mintzberg's complaint is the criticism advanced by Rakesh Khurana of Harvard Business School, who is writing a book on why management has failed to develop as a profession. He points out that other activities in which society prizes a sense of restraint, judgment and the pursuit of the common good, such as law, health care and religion, have evolved into professions. A surprising number of business schools, including Wharton in Pennsylvania and IESE in Barcelona, were founded by people who wanted to improve the ethical sensitivity of managers. (IESE, founded by Opus Dei, a Catholic organisation, still has religious statues and paintings in its principal rooms.) "At the heart of professionalism is the renunciation of certain things," claims Mr Khurana. American managers have not obviously been keen on renunciation in the past decade.
But could business schools change this? Lots of them now offer courses on ethics, surely a key attribute of professionalism. Students are not always enthusiastic. Besides, whatever the ethicists say, the overall impact of a course may teach a different lesson. In 2002 the Aspen Institute surveyed 2,000 MBA students and found that their values altered during the course. By the end, they cared less about customer needs and product quality and more about shareholder value. Management research tells a similar tale. A study last year of management research in economic and social contexts found far more emphasis on economic performance and objectives than on social goals. (See "Social Issues and Management: Our Lost Cause Found" by James Walsh, Klaus Weber and Joshua Margolis, Journal of Management, 2003.)
A rather different complaint is that business schools are increasingly pulled in two directions. They want to teach students practical relevant skills. They want their research to come up with important, novel findings. But the gap between teaching and research grows ever wider.
In her presidential address to the Academy of Management last year, Jone Pearce of the Graduate School of Management at the University of California, Irvine, drew attention to the divide between the scholarly world of research and what she called "folk wisdom": the insights conveyed in the classroom. "Many of us", she told her fellow practitioners, "have created these two nearly parallel worlds as a way of coping with the conflicting pressures of conducting serious scholarship and the need to teach experienced managers who pay a lot of money to learn something useful." Yet little of the folk wisdom drew on the findings of research or had undergone scholarly testing.
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