Print

 Email

Have The Values Of Higher Education Become The Values Of Graduates?

Now that we know that it was almost exclusively MBA trained managers who brought down banking and finance, it’s hard to claim innocence.

New York

Higher Education On Trial

MBA thinking — a values system that rests substantially upon a war paradigm — has become widespread in all areas of business, commerce, banking and finance. Absent a wider understanding of the essential balance between societal goals and economic opportunity, MBA driven short term thinking and opportunism distorts decision making, obfuscates reality, masks risk and subverts essential long-term corporate interests in favor of short-term goals.

Short term Thinking

If there is a failure in American MBA thinking, which recent history strongly suggests may be the case, it is curricular emphasis and laboratory methodologies that seek short-term outcomes in preference to long range strategies.

Some argue that the MBA virus blinds management to critical issues concerning the long term viability of enterprises. For some enterprises,  including Bear Stearns, Merrill Lynch and Lehman Brothers, the drive for short term profitability ended in insolvency and collapse. What delivered these firms from the illusion of prosperity to the reality of failure was a false belief. None of these businesses created the false belief system, it arrived in the hearts and minds of recruits.

The failed belief system turns out to have been taught in business schools for at least the last two generations: that any means to achieve greater efficiency, or profitability, or competitiveness is acceptable.

To the degree this is true it reveals an unpleasant reality — the failure of higher education to serve its own prime mission: to educate young adults to serve the public interest for the greater good of society. In higher education today notions of liberal professions have given way to promotion and curriculum aimed solely at preparing students for lucrative professions.

In today’s business schools, personal success, measured solely in terms of personal achievement ( material wealth ) is central to both curriculum and instructional model. Preparing for and obtaining a lucrative profession is every students’ central priority. With both student and syllabus firmly rooted in materialistic values, absent any constraint, adding ethical studies to the curriculum, or offering students other palliatives, including an oath, fall far short of what is required.

It’s The Money, Stupid!

It is now common, especially at public universities, to offer non traditional courses that focus on salable employment skills with little or no liberal arts foundation. Once an institution buys into the concept that degrees in Roman History are of little or no value, personal achievement degree programs easily take on new, and often unwanted characteristics.  Personal achievement courses and degree programs are  promoted for their earnings enhancement potential. Look at any business school website — for they all promote the prospects of good, exceptionally well-paying jobs as their principal value to potential students.

Today’s emphasis on personal gain, as opposed to public gain, is especially troublesome at America’s top-ranked business schools. As colleges began to compete with one another on the basis of personal gain where previously they competed on public advancement,  there began a systemic encroachment of monetary values  over academic quality.

Business Schools As Instruments Of Thievery

Private Gain Drives Out Public Interest

At most American universities, learning about our civilization, historical foundations, cultural achievements, history, and failures has given way to job-skill training for personal enrichment.

Perhaps no other area of higher education has so sharply abdicated public interest and civil values than have business schools. Taken together, changes in educational policy, purpose, and scope altered most but not all western educational institutions away from their founding purpose and toward becoming instruments of personal advancement.

For many, the force that brought banking and finance to the brink of collapse was MBA driven — that is an in-situ managerial bureaucracy largely devoid of values, long on situational ethics and largely absent social responsibility. If there is a failure in MBA thinking, which recent history strongly suggests, it arose from curricular emphasis and laboratory methodologies that sought short-term outcomes in preference to long range strategies.

Do all universities favor such short sighted views? Of course not, but all universities do have to compete for students — and that requires promotion based upon the same values system that brought down banking and finance. It’s not that colleges and universities, and prestigious and outrageously expensive business schools, set out to do wrong — they simply embraced it because they, too, have become invested in business values, marketing strategies and managerial sleight-of-hand.

Me Tooism

Today’s aspiring college students do not expect a college education would enable them to better understand the wider world. They view their college education entirely as a private rather than a public good.

Recent studies on what attracts students in choosing a course of study revealed that civic responsibility is the least important determinant. Today’s students made their decisions based on which college or program promises  greater success in the work force. As for traditional college values, students seeking admission to American universities have lite knowledge about, nor interest in a school offering to prepare them as citizens, community participants, or responsible adults.

Failed Social Ethos

Ethos?

Ethos ( the characteristic spirit, prevalent tone of sentiment, of a people or community ) is what separates business and commerce from criminality. Absent ethos business management takes on the characteristics of opportunism, barbarism, despotism and felony.

In the year since the collapse of world-wide credit markets, the MBA virus has come under attack. It is part of the problem, but only a small one. Still, it forced some business schools to re-think their curriculum, mission, methods and values. It’s a good first step, but little more than that. Neither is it easily done, nor quickly accomplished — for MBA programs are lucrative and prestigious — powerful motivators that drive business schools to be aggressive and competitive in attracting qualified candidates as well as producing successful outcomes.

Most American universities were founded on a long standing social ethos that defined personal success as acting in the interest of the common good. Notions of a social ethos undergirded higher education  for centuries. Then, in the late 20th century, political, economic and social forces, including the rise of banking, finance and commercialism were joined with an increasingly urban and industrial society. America changed, western culture changed and so did everything else.

There has been renewed interest in MBA program curriculum by both the colleges and universities that offer business degrees. Some of them argue in favor of an ethics course, or better, an ethical foundation upon which a newer and more gentle MBA managerial system might be developed. An enterprising MBA candidate at Harvard even offered an MBA Oath meant to clarify the issues for future students.

At issue in the raging debate over the application of MBA managerial methods and standards is the ( lack of ) ethos, ethics and public responsibility underlying the narrowly defined and insular management strategies and methods favored in graduate level business studies.

Programs leading to the Masters Degree in business administration ( MBA ) give scant attention to the role business, finance and commerce play in furthering the goals of society, national interests and political stability. Instead, MBA programs are seen to solely develop skills of optimization, efficiency, and temporal gain. Absent ethos business management takes on the characteristics of opportunism, barbarism, despotism and felony.

The result of widespread MBA virus infection has produced a serious and largely unchecked distortion of the role of business in modern societies. The outcome of high levels of specialization in short-term management skills, when viewed over several decades, has been widespread emphasis on managerial models, methods, practices and systems that assume all business activities as if war, not as an integral function essential to society.

The result, as we have now learned, is chaos and potential economic collapse.