According to a recent Wall
Street Journal article, business schools are placing increased emphasis on
the employability of their students prior to admission. I won’t speculate to what extent this is
motivated by the need to protect their job placement statistics in a grim
economy, but it’s worth considering the true consequences of this trend. As the article notes, business schools have
always considered the goals of the applicant – but to what extent are they
curating these goals on the front end?
Even if we assume good intentions, the effect is to reinforce the status
quo, making business school populations even more risk-averse and less
entrepreneurial.
Ironically, this seems to be at least partly motivated by the banking collapse: “when the financial crisis upended the banking sector and sure-thing jobs on Wall Street disappeared, schools began formally tying input (applicants) to output (graduates).” Why “ironically”? Regardless of how much blame you want to assign to federal housing and lending policy as opposed to private sector recklessness, the financial crisis wasn’t brought on by entrepreneurial, non-linear thinking. Legions of conventionally smart people who had done everything right, rigorously following twenty year plans including name-brand firms and business schools, managed to get the biggest bets horribly wrong. This is not meant to be flippant – current market conditions and job statistics are stubborn things that must be acknowledged. However, if the lesson of the financial crisis is that we should double down on conventional wisdom, regardless of whether anything of value is created, then we’ve indeed learned nothing from the past five years.
As someone who frequently uses the frame of inputs vs. outputs, I took immediate notice of the wording above. It would be encouraging to see an extremely input-focused sector more concerned with outputs, but I suspect they have confused the two in this case, merely trading one set of inputs for another (the addition of an MBA). You can also think of this as commoditizing human capital, and this calls the entire purpose of an MBA into question. Is business school meant to, help develop leaders, or serve as a finishing process on a prestigious kind of assembly line?
The article goes on to state that “making employability too weighty a factor in admissions can backfire. “ According to Graham Richmond, a former admissions officer at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, “Looking at applicants through a narrow vocational lens may deter schools from accepting riskier candidates, such as entrepreneurs or career-switchers, in favor of more sure things, such as aspiring management consultants.” The fact that aspiring management consultants are considered “sure things” is evidence of how much MBA culture values process over invention. Candidates and schools understandably want assurances, especially in the wake of 2008. The world is a chaotic place, even more so since the financial crisis (though I contend that it has always been so, and that the banking industry simply managed to insulate itself unusually well for as long as it could). Obviously, you have to adapt to the current reality. Yet I can’t help but wonder if by focusing on doing obvious, “safe” things, to the exclusion of risk-taking and creativity, the MBA community isn’t just constructing an elaborate playpen in which nothing new ever happens.