life as understood

Disclosure: I have not attended a business school, but am a recent graduate of a college that competes for funding with one, and wallows in mighty defeat.

I've talked about the subject of business school here in brief, but never known exactly how to approach it more comprehensively. But most of my closest friends are graduates from business school, and they're wonderful people. I don't look down my nose at their degrees or anyone else's. In fact, some of the very smartest, most driven people I know are among them. I guess I'm just trying to figure out for my own sanity if, in the grand scheme of things, business schools actually do anything. Let me explain where this comes from.

My experience with our business school in my current position has been less than pleasant. Every other college on campus is consistently helpful and professional in meeting with me and contributing to my efforts. Almost all of the staff help I've solicited so far at the School of Business, however, has shut me down hard, each time in a very belittling fashion, as though they're too important to take time for me in my job (which is to assist them). It's almost as if they need to put on an air of superiority to mask the fact that many of them are still, in their hearts, undeclared.

In fact, at my university, and I suspect many others, majoring in "business" is often just a less embarrassing way of saying "I'm undeclared." It's a tiny bit different, though. It actually means "I don't know what I want to do with my life, but I'd like to make some money and maybe go on some cool business trips." There's nothing dishonorable about this indecision, of course. It usually doesn't stick, anyway. A colleague of mine who deals with freshman recruitment told me that a very high percentage of high schoolers enter college as business majors, and within four years, the majority have transferred to other departments. Presumably, they've figured out their lives' ambitions and left to follow them.

I'm guessing that most of those that stick around are of some more specific persuasion than simply "business." They are accountants, economists, and so forth. But no doubt, many virtual undeclareds do in fact slip through the cracks and attain degrees. Then, when these graduates grow up and still don't know what they want to do, they decide to work for business schools, in lifelong attempts to legitimize their own degrees. They stand guard at the years-old facade that business school is in fact productive, wary of outsiders who tread near the palace to which they've dedicated their lives, lest an outsider discover that the palace is empty.

An Englishman I knew in Russia, and one of the most successful men I know, told me that if I want to make it big in business, don't major in business. He explained that it takes specialists in other fields not only to come up with the big ideas, but to bring them to fruition as well. It made sense to me. After all, if I'm selling a product, I want engineers developing, building, and testing it. Most everything else, including sales and management, doesn't require any credential other than experience.

The point is, those engineering majors go to school thinking, "I'm going to use my degree to improve people's lives," and certainly, most budding scientists, artists, lawyers and others often feel the same way. Conversely, the very purpose of the business management degree is simply to make the bearer money. Now, I love capitalism as much as the next man (probably more), but I think it's a shame that we're actually spending countless dollars and awarding degrees by training people to increase revenue through self-serving sales and marketing tactics, rather than by building better products and services to aid humanity.

In the long run, wouldn't it make more sense to have the 2000 (estimate) students in our business school each specialize in some sort of beneficial other field, and let those who are eventually going to run a business learn the ropes via apprenticeship and experience, or maybe a cheap book and a community ed class? Friends from the palace tell me that business degrees are essentially useless once you get that first job, anyway--from then on, nobody cares whether you went to Harvard or ITT Tech. Everything in the actual workforce is learned and gained by experience.

I guess what I'm really wondering is this: how many millions of dollars have to be spent on educating students who won't even use their degrees, much less for anything useful, while so many scholars with aspirations in other, often more intrinsically beneficial fields receive fewer resources as a result?

By the way, obviously, many degrees under the business banner, i.e. accounting and economics and whatnot, are actually in and of themselves specialized and useful. In addition, those who want to will go on and do great things. I'm guessing that the palace guards that have been so impertinent and unhelpful to me are in fact those who have yet to decide what they really want to do in this life. I guess, at their age, I'd be pretty defensive about that too.