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The Ohio State University's Fisher College Of Business

For those who only know The Ohio State University for its athletic programs, the notion that one of the nation’s best business schools is somewhere out on the prairie may come as news. Within sight of the Olentangy river, just across Woody Hayes drive from famed Ohio Stadium, some of the nation’s best and brightest study business, finance, economics,  accounting, human resource management, marketing and logistics.

The Ohio State University

Failed Criteria, Failed Judgment

Perhaps the result of the recent collapses in banking and finance, the value of an MBA degree is in question — especially if it was granted by one of the top 20 MBA granting institutions. While it’s the degree that’s at issue, the broader question is the impact failed business ethics have on our best colleges and universities.

Today, The Ohio State University, competes against several hundred other business schools for students seeking careers in business and management. Being competitive in higher education is complicated and sometimes exasperating for both schools and students due to rankings, status and desirability metrics based on what is easily measured as opposed to what’s most important. That said, this nation’s top business schools are highly competitive — which comes as no surprise — although the criteria on which they are judged may shock even the most jaded observer. Business Week undergraduate rankings.

In what has become an American infatuation with simplistic metrics that provide mathematically accurate rankings based on questionable, or even silly criteria, the Max M. Fisher College of Business does not rank among the very best.

MBA Program Rank
Business Week ( 2007 )

1. University of Chicago (Booth)
2. Harvard University
3. Northwestern University (Kellogg)
4. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton)
5. University of Michigan (Ross)
6. Stanford University
7. Columbia University
8. Duke University (Fuqua)
9. MIT (Sloan)
10. UC Berkeley (Haas)

The best maybe, but not among the top 10, not even in the second 10, or third 10. The Ohio State University’s MBA program ranked 42nd in the 2007 Business Week listings based on criteria that fails the most generous definition of relevance.

Rights Of The Powerful

When someone recently suggested that an MBA degree was little more than evidence of being trained to steal lawfully, the charge had a ring of truth — especially to those with long histories in business management and governance. Some of those we’ve spoken to on the issues give a wry, knowing smile and pass off such criticism by exclaiming, ‘that’s business.‘ Is it?, someone else asked? There was no answer, for as a nation and as a culture we are at war with ourselves, our values and our innate competitiveness.

Is it all right for businesses to lie, cheat and steal? Of course not, but it happens every day because what we claim to believe and what we really do are very different.

Your bank may have recently have substantially increased your credit card interest rate. You had nothing to say in the matter for the drive to optimize is so central to MBA education and thinking that it engenders an attitude of entitlement — sometimes described as the right of the powerful to screw the rest of us.

Is this behavior the equivalent to stealing? Clearly not if you’re on the power end of the transaction.

Bankers, America’s Great Power Ball Players

More On MBA Issues

Shared Legacy, Shared Fate

MBA: Failed Curriculum, Failing Brand

Bulletin: Establishment Caught Stealing America

MBA Thinking: Enabler Of Castastrophe

America’s Fat Cats: Caught In The Cookie Jar

Breaking The Bank Takes On New Meaning

Is It Enough To Say I’m Sorry?

Those now attacking MBA thinking, and by inference MBA education, are on the increase. The reason has far more to do with the egregiously flagrant behavior or this nation’s bankers, financiers, business managers and CEOs than with specific failures in MBA schooling per se. While it’s clear that the best business schools have lost their way, it’s also true that the demise in responsible education, ethical models and public interest values continues today.

To the degree that today’s highly competitive business school rankings assign little or no value to the quality of teaching, culture, ethos, balance, curriculum model, or course offerings, what’s crass is what matters. The same can be said for the massive encroachment of trade-school model education at nearly every major university today. For what matters most in today’s highly competitive college rankings business is money. Money for the publishers, money for the schools who attract the biggest spending students, and money for headhunters, placement advisors and corporate recruiters.

Failures Of Higher Education

As a culture and as a nation today’s higher education is about personal gain, plain and simple. America’s colleges and universities are flourishing today, not entirely by means of endowments, or state support, but by a pervasive change in educational standards and values. Our national infatuation with being rich as opposed to living a rich life has infected most of our institutions — including our once cherished citadels of wisdom, knowledge and culture. Higher education has been infected with business values and business ethics. It’s part of our emerging corporate state — one in which money and wealth are the only measures of success, value, accomplishment or a life well lived.

The old days are over, even at state supported universities like Ohio State where fuddy-duddy professorial administrators have been pushed aside by corporate presidencies and business laden boards of trustees. Gone from boards of trustees are the legendary leaders in higher education — men who built or infused greatness for universities all over the country. At Ohio State it was William Oxley Thompson who made the university his life and in the doing raised a stodgy land-grant institution to prominence. In the last 30 years, college presidents have become business directed careerists who work in their own best interests for whomever bids the highest price. One result has been that long term vision, and influence over academic quality and accomplishment, have been made to give way to fund raisers and media personalities.

As with nearly every other American institution, our major universities, and even some of the liberal arts colleges, have been infused with what has sometimes been mislabeled as MBA thinking when in reality those institutions have switched from being education driven schools to businesses. Where once a president at Ohio State might have overseen the development of his institution for two or three decades, few big university presidents stay at any one institution more than 4-6 years.

Being a business offers many advantages to a university — among them immensely rich and profitable athletics programs, research grants, and strategic course offerings aimed at attracting as many students as economically beneficial. Consider what the Fisher College offers its potential students in terms of specialization programs:

The Management program incorporates a carefully constructed business core curriculum with a strong grounding in management knowledge and skills. Students may choose to focus in an area of special interest through one of seven concentrations: Computer Information and Systems, Fashion Merchandising, Health Care Management, Hospitality and Tourism, Human Resource Management, Marketing or Public Administration.

While we’ve used the Fisher College program to illustrate the problems, the commercial drive to attract students with course offerings with little educational merit or foundation has infected nearly every university in the nation. Some specialization courses are based on strong academic foundations, as for example computer information and systems. Fashion merchandising is about optimizing the performance of fashion related goods. But that same focus is given to all specialty programs. Thus Health care management’s principal focus is on efficiency and profitability of a health provider institution — not managing health care for the optimal benefit of patients, clients or customers. Sadly, this is how America thinks today.

So, is an MBA degree really a way to lawfully steal? Of course not, but for many Americans today, it appears to come perilously close.

About The Ohio State University’s Max Fisher College Of Business

In buildings funded by a gift from automobile legend Max Fisher, the Ohio State University Max M. Fisher College of Business serves both undergraduate and graduate students in a wide range of specialized programs.

Fisher College full-time enrollment is about 4000. The Master Of Business Administration program serves another 150 MBA seeking students. The Fisher College’s Ph.D program enrollment is typically around 60.

Under former Dean Joseph Alutto, the Fisher College expanded the breadth and quality of its graduate program. One of Fisher’s graduate programs leads to an MBA degree — once one of the most prestigious credentials on Wall Street, in banking, insurance and corporate management.

Newsroom Magazine Publisher Robert Butche Is Among 62,000 Ohio State University Business School Alumni.