29 April 2009
A,B,C Easy As 1,2,3
Filed under Rant
After my most recent foray (back) into “Higher Education”, this statement from the Economist really resonated with me:
What’s wrong with business school is not that some MBAs cheat. It’s that they don’t even feel compelled to lie about it. That may be because business schools operate as, well, businesses that bring in lots of revenue for the university.
Many MBAs I taught informed me they were customers and it was my job to provide them with a service: an economics class for their transcript. The class was to be wildly entertaining and not too rigorous. One student emailed me because my section conflicted with his regular golf game. He instructed me to make arrangements to have my section videoed so he could watch it at his leisure. I forwarded the email to the professor supervising me as a joke, but he promptly arranged a video crew to come to my section.
From my perspective, as a student, I prefer the mildly entertaining and more rigorous course study and have been thoroughly put off by the “grades for green” approach I encountered. It seems obvious to me that if everyone who pays advances just the same and with minimal effort, that would only serve to minimize the worth of my final product. I would love to see a shift to realistic and moderately stable tuition prices with fewer, more thoroughly trained graduates.
But, where’s the profit in that?
2009-04-29 :: admin
29 April 2009 @ 4:30 pm
I wonder if it will mean that we need to go back to Ph.d. quality education to get advanced degrees. I was shocked when I looked at jobs that were in my experience range an many of them preferred MBA’s. I was like, I have 10 years of practical experience in what to do and most importantly what not to do which I think is better than a bought degree.
30 April 2009 @ 7:43 am
Some of us didn’t give away grades and got trashed on the evaluations.