The Business School ‘Business’: Some Lessons from the US Experience*

TLDR

US business schools dominate the MBA landscape, prompting emulation worldwide, yet they suffer problems rooted in a career‑enhancing, salary‑driven value proposition rather than a professional ethos. The study documents these problems and shows they arise from a market‑like orientation to education coupled with an absence of a professional ethos. The authors analyze the US business school model, linking the identified issues to its market orientation and lack of professional ethos.

Abstract

abstract US business schools dominate the business school landscape, particularly for the MBA degree. This fact has caused schools in other countries to imitate the US schools as a model for business education. But US business schools face a number of problems, many of them a result of offering a value proposition that primarily emphasizes the career‐enhancing, salary‐increasing aspects of business education as contrasted with the idea of organizational management as a profession to be pursued out of a sense of intrinsic interest or even service. We document some of the problems confronting US business schools and show how many of these arise from a combination of a market‐like orientation to education coupled with an absence of a professional ethos. In this tale, there are some lessons for educational organizations both in the US and elsewhere that are interested in learning from the US experience.