Friday, February 19, 2016

My Horrific "Business" School Education



By Matthew T. Tice

Since the 2008 financial crisis, the business world has come under fire, with public attacks on Wall Street greed, big banks and wealthy Americans. With the 2016 election just nine months away, there is a growing chorus that the entire U.S. economic system is “rigged.” While you might expect such antibusiness rhetoric from left-leaning politicians, it is now part of the curriculum at many business schools.

I am a recent graduate of Bentley University, a small business-oriented college located in Waltham, Mass., just outside Boston. The school typically ranks among the top 25 undergraduate business programs in the country. Like many other business schools, Bentley prides itself on an advanced business curriculum infused with “the richness of a liberal arts education.” Yet rather than providing a solid grounding in the classical humanities—which would be very useful in the business world—many of the nonbusiness courses I took espoused an illiberal attitude toward American capitalism and business in general.

In sociology, we were lectured on how the richest 1% of Americans control more than 50% of the wealth in the country but don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes. We were also informed that the average pay for the CEO of a Fortune 500 company is more than 344 times the average salary for workers in their firms. In expository writing, for our final paper in the class, we had to compose a persuasive essay on why the American dream is dead in the 21st century.

In biology, rather than dissecting fetal pigs or frogs, we watched “documentaries” such as “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Gasland” to learn about global warming, climate change and the environmental dangers posed by hydraulic fracturing and fossil-fuel companies. Almost every one of my elective history and literature courses seemed to dwell on some low point of capitalism, including the trustbusting era of the late 1800s, the decadent Roaring 1920s, the Great Depression and, of course, the 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing “Great Recession.”

Many of these themes were reinforced in my general business classes. In my introductory accounting and finance course, we learned the basics by studying all of the major corporate frauds of the past two decades, including Enron, Sunbeam, WorldCom and Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. In business law and ethics, rather than specific statutes and individual integrity, we focused on whether the goals of corporate sustainability and social responsibility were compatible with profit maximization, along with another review of the rogues’ gallery of Jeff Skilling, Al Dunlap and the Bernies—Ebbers and Madoff. In human behavior and organizations, instead of organizational theory, we discussed social justice issues such as the glass ceiling, equal pay and racism in the workplace.

I majored in Finance, and it was only in these more quantitative core courses that I was able to find a safe space from the ideological indoctrination. Bentley has a first-rate trading room supported by cutting-edge technology and real-time market data feeds. This provided the perfect learning environment for dissecting corporate 10-K filings, building discounted cash-flow models, analyzing technical trends and studying the global economy and financial markets.

Unfortunately, only 20% of the 122 credits that I needed to graduate went toward satisfying the requirements for my Finance major, while more than half of the courses that I took seemed designed to turn me into a self-loathing Finance major....

During my four years of college, annual tuition costs increased by a compound annual growth rate of 3.6%, or roughly double the rate of U.S. consumer price inflation over the same period. For the fully-loaded cost of my four years at Bentley University—tuition plus student fees, housing and meals—I could have purchased a twin-turbo, two-door 2016 Bentley Continental GT V8 S coupe, which notably comes in either the blue or gold colors of my alma mater. I am still working on that comparative return analysis.

The full article is here.

3 comments:

  1. Ayn Rand wrote about this sort of thing decades ago. Apparently, nothing has changed.

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  2. Academia is corrupt. For many reasons academics hate: freedom, private property, free choice and capitalism. The entire institution is corrupt, it does nothing to liberate young minds anymore. News Flash, the justice system has become corrupt. Every American over 18 years of age is guilty of a federal crime. It is simply up to whom they decide to go after. New new flash, our financial system is corrupt. After Greenspan manipulating interest rates well below market, and Bernanke doing the same and Yellen doing the same, we now have rational actors responding to their situations and taking on too much debt (under priced so over consumed). New new new flash, all present housing finance is a government operation, no market participant would loan money for housing if they could do otherwise. It almost 100% Franny and Freddy, and etc. News, news, news flash, college is not worth the cost except in a few cases (those few being nasty if you look into how they bestow their blessing on our future leaders). News, news, news, news flash, your media is corrupt. They have acted as a gatekeeper because it used to cost a lot of money to send out information. So people who wanted their information sent out to the public conspired with the people who controlled the expensive means of sending out information to send to you exactly what they wanted and nothing else. So much corruption

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  3. We are losing the intellectual battle and that translates into losing the masses.

    ReplyDelete