MBA/Business Programs and the Economic Mess

[dynasaw]

"Harvard grads frequently go on to highly influential jobs on Wall Street, at think tanks, and in government. Did the principles they learned in their alma mater's most popular class cause America’s financial crisis and growing wealth gap? That's the view of a group of approximately 70 students who walked out of professor N. Gregory Mankiw's Economics 10 class this week in solidarity with the Occupy protests happening coast-to-coast.

The students say the conservative slant of the economic theories taught by the prominent professor are driving policies that create inequality. According to their open letter to Mankiw—who advised President George W. Bush and now Mitt Romney—the free market, laissez faire capitalism he teaches to nearly 700 students every semester deprives students of "an analytic understanding of economics as part of a quality liberal arts education."Mankiw's academic influence also extends well beyond Harvard. His textbook, Principles of Economics, is widely used in introduction to economics classes nationwide.

Without any "critical discussion of both the benefits and flaws" of alternative economic theories, the students say, it's "difficult for subsequent economics courses to teach effectively" since coeds who take the class are familiar with "only one heavily skewed perspective." The students also say that Mankiw’s class "does not include primary sources and rarely features articles from academic journals."

According to the Harvard Crimson, Mankiw was aware of the walkout and made announcements at the beginning of class, saying "I have a feeling people might leave a little early." When the students got up to leave, some of their peers booed. Senior Jeremy Patashnik, an economics major, told the student paper he identifies as a liberal and doesn't see any bias in the class. "I think this walkout misses the point of what Ec 10 is supposed to be," Patashnik said.

But dissenters like Patashnik didn't deter the protesters. "Harvard graduates have been complicit have aided many of the worst injustices of recent years," freshman Rachel J. Sandalow-Ash told a crowd outside the classroom, according to the Crimson. Sandalow-Ash, one of the organizers of the walkout, continued, "Harvard students will not do that anymore. We will use our education for good, and not for personal gain at the expense of millions."

Of course, one class didn't create the entire financial crisis, but at a time when the world is experiencing such economic instability, it's not a bad idea for students everywhere to take a critical eye on what they're being taught. Then perhaps when they graduate and hold positions of power, they'll be less likely to repeat their predecessors' policy mistakes."

http://www.good.is/post/is-a-harvard-economics-class-the-root-of-the-financial-crisis/?utm_content=headline&utm_medium=hp_carousel&utm_source=slide_1

[JDPriestly]

1. List of courses for an MBA at Colombia University

Accounting
Banking
Berkeley elective
Business
Business Economics
Business Law
Core
Decision and Risk Analysis
Decision, Risk, and Operations
Entrepreneurship
Finance

FlexCore
Healthcare
Human Resource Management
International Business
Leadership
Management
Marketing
Markets (Flexcore)
Master Class
Media
Operations Management

Organizations
Organizations (FlexCore)
Performance
Performance (FlexCore)
PhD Classes
Real Estate
Retailing
Social Enterprise
Taxes

http://www4.gsb.columbia.edu/courses?&main.term=0&main.year=2011&main.aos_label=Business&main.prog=&main.view=coursedb.nav.catalog

There is also a course of corporate governance. That sounds promising until you look at the syllabus.

Class 1: What is Corporate Governance and why is it important?

Class 2 (Dec. 2): Controlling Owners, Corporate Boards and Minority Shareholders

Class 3 (Dec. 7): Separation of Ownership from Control: CEOs, Corporate Boards, and Block Shareholders

Class 4 (Dec. 9): Group Behavior and Board Decision-Making
Assignment: Hewlett-Packard Role Plays, Reenactment of HP board meeting at
which CEO is fired.

https://angel.gsb.columbia.edu/AngelUploads/Content/6901-001-20113/_syllabus/Syllabus%20B6901%20Fall%202011%2009-01-11.pdf

The corporate governance course is the only one that seems to even touch on anything sounding like social ethics. And it appears to be mostly about compliance with the law, not any social obligation beyond that.

That is what is wrong with the 1% today.

In contrast, to become a lawyer in California, you have not only have to take a course in legal ethics, but you have to pass a test on it. Yet lawyers are ridiculed for their lack of ethics when it is really the businessmen that hire the lawyers who lack any training in incorporating a sense of fairness and right and wrong into their practice of their profession.

[Democrats_win]

5. An education "very poor in moral, intellectual, and spiritual tone."

from "The Great Conversation," a 1952 essay written by Robert Maynard Hutchins to introduce Encyclopedia Britannica's Great Books of the Western World.

According to Hutchins, "The tradition of the West is embodied in the Great Conversation that began in the dawn of history and that continues to the present day."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Conversation

Hutchins also says, "We want the voices of the Great Conversation to be
heard again because we think they may help us to learn to
live better now."

[Lydia Leftcoast]

2. From what I saw teaching undergraduates, majoring in business is not education but

job training and indoctrination.

And business was by far the most popular major when I was teaching in the 1980s and early 1990s.

My earliest students are now in their early fifties :scared: This means that those who survived the corporate rat race are now moving into positions of power. Remembering what some of them were like and thinking that they now have a real say in our local economies is even scarier than the thought of how old they are.

[patrice]

3. K&R

[Coyote_Bandit]

4. My MBA coursework

included at least 9 hours of directed study - my choice but subject o approval and supervision - and about 6 credit hours of study focused on small business and entrapeneurship.

Granted, my degree isn't Ivy League.