The Business School Business: Some Lessons from the U.S. Experience

U.S. business schools dominate the business school landscape, particularly for the MBA degree. This fact has caused schools in other countries to imitate the U.S. schools as a model for business education. But U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. and elsewhere that are interested in learning from the U.S. experience.