(Photo credit: mcfarlandmo)
SMS and Twitter are often accused of creating a generation with small attention spans who are growing incapable of expressing complex ideas in long and eloquent prose. Columbia Business School doesn’t think so, and in this year’s MBA application form, asks applicants to state their post-MBA goals in no more than 200 characters. Harvard Business School requires applicants to Answer a question you wish wed asked?” in 400 words. Such and other novel essay questions in this year’s Ivy League b-school applications are compiled in this story by the Wall Street Journal.
This has prompted Forbes to publish a column on what looks like the dumbing down of business schools. It writes about the focus on ethics,
“The other heavily-trafficked area of contemporary business school is ethics, or the idea of ethics as an independent component of curriculum. Rather than incorporate ethics informally into typical coursework, programs are moving toward establishing whole classes devoted to ethics.
The implication is that students and the business world are too crude to have a tacit understanding of right and wrong and need formal instruction in how to recognize the difference. This is what the late Journal editorial page editor Robert Bartley referred to as the difference between ethics in business and the ethics business all the way back in 1987. Ethics have become like human resources, an autonomous element of business curriculum directed by self-proclaimed experts.”
While on ethics, a column by Alexander Heffner on philly.com calls for b-schools to do something about professors whose academic influence in areas such as economics, finance and accounting might be in conflict with their advisory and consulting projects. In simple terms, it argues that “Most campuses today allow faculty members to teach economic policies that would buttress their pocketbook and nonacademic financial pursuits.” Using examples from the 2008 recession dissecting documentary The Inside Job says,
“Just as academic historians should not be employed by the regimes they are investigating, and professors of medicine should not teach about successful medicines when they are employed by drug’s manufacturer, business professors should not consult for Citigroup or a hedge fund when undertaking scholarship pertaining to banks.”
Back in India, P Kishore, the Managing Director of Everonn Education was arrested on charges of bribing Income Tax officials to hide income amounting to Rs 116 crore. Everonn Education is the company providing on-ground support to Prometric for conducting the Common Admissions Test (CAT). Soon after the arrest, stocks of both Everonn and Educomp — two rapidly growing private educational services giants — reportedly took a 50-60% beating. An Economic Times article analyses the reactions of the investor community towards education companies after this event.