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By Ronald M. Bosrock
B-school curriculums will have to evolve to stay relevant, three business school professors argue.
Is the MBA degree still worth it?
Earlier this year, the Harvard Business Review published its list of the 50 best-performing CEOs in the world. The base for the survey was the chief executives of 1,109 companies.
Out of that top 50 list only 14 CEOs had master of business administration degrees. And only eight of those were from the U.S. schools. Furthermore, out of the original pool of candidates, only 32 percent had MBAs.
The results of this survey alone might be reason enough to question the relevancy of the degree in today's world.
When I started college in the late 1950s few of my classmates were planning to get an MBA as an advanced degree. Several were planning on going to law school, dental school or getting a master's in political science or history. But not business school. It wasn't until the late 1970s and 1980s that interest in business school seemed to take hold. Movies like "Wall Street" in 1987 made the business world sexy. The young investment bankers, private equity managers and analysts advanced the short-term strategies that laid the foundation for the recent financial disaster.
For some time now the MBA has been the "hot" ticket for the young and ambitious, the same way the engineering degree was after the Soviets launched Sputnik, causing near panic that the United States was technologically behind its Cold War adversary.
But since the most recent financial crash, criticism has been leveled against the kind of training the MBA provides.
In their recent book, "Rethinking the MBA," Harvard business school professors Srikant Datar, David Garvin and Patrick Cullen suggest that business schools played a contributing role in the financial meltdown of 2008. They argue that too many MBAs didn't learn the "importance of social responsibility, common-sense skepticism and respect for the risk they were taking with other people's money."
Is this kind of criticism enough to dissuade students from pursuing the degree? Not likely. The demand for the degree can be seen in our own community. The flagship program is probably the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Business, followed by several others including the University of St. Thomas, St. Mary's University, Hamline, Concordia and Augsburg, to name a few. In addition to the standard schools there are about 50 online MBA programs available.
As the demand for the degree continues to grow, so does the demand for more relevancy.
B-school curriculums will have to evolve to stay relevant, three business school professors argue.
Is the MBA degree still worth it?
Earlier this year, the Harvard Business Review published its list of the 50 best-performing CEOs in the world. The base for the survey was the chief executives of 1,109 companies.
Out of that top 50 list only 14 CEOs had master of business administration degrees. And only eight of those were from the U.S. schools. Furthermore, out of the original pool of candidates, only 32 percent had MBAs.
The results of this survey alone might be reason enough to question the relevancy of the degree in today's world.
When I started college in the late 1950s few of my classmates were planning to get an MBA as an advanced degree. Several were planning on going to law school, dental school or getting a master's in political science or history. But not business school. It wasn't until the late 1970s and 1980s that interest in business school seemed to take hold. Movies like "Wall Street" in 1987 made the business world sexy. The young investment bankers, private equity managers and analysts advanced the short-term strategies that laid the foundation for the recent financial disaster.
For some time now the MBA has been the "hot" ticket for the young and ambitious, the same way the engineering degree was after the Soviets launched Sputnik, causing near panic that the United States was technologically behind its Cold War adversary.
But since the most recent financial crash, criticism has been leveled against the kind of training the MBA provides.
In their recent book, "Rethinking the MBA," Harvard business school professors Srikant Datar, David Garvin and Patrick Cullen suggest that business schools played a contributing role in the financial meltdown of 2008. They argue that too many MBAs didn't learn the "importance of social responsibility, common-sense skepticism and respect for the risk they were taking with other people's money."
Is this kind of criticism enough to dissuade students from pursuing the degree? Not likely. The demand for the degree can be seen in our own community. The flagship program is probably the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Business, followed by several others including the University of St. Thomas, St. Mary's University, Hamline, Concordia and Augsburg, to name a few. In addition to the standard schools there are about 50 online MBA programs available.
As the demand for the degree continues to grow, so does the demand for more relevancy.
