Posts tagged with school.

Business schools shouldn’t stand on their own

Joey Coleman, February 8, 2010 at 4:18 PM

 

Colin Mayer, Peter Moores Dean at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, argues in an opinion piece published last year  that "business schools are on the cusp of a new dawn which will see their significance and size expand to greater heights." 

He's right, but not for the reasons stated in his opinion.

Noting that, since "their inception more than 100 years ago, the death of business schools and MBAs has been predicted to be imminent," Dr. Mayer believes business schools are finally finding their place within the academy. He openly discusses the dirty secret about how business schools are perceived by business as being too academic and by academia as not being academic at all. In short, they have an identity crisis.

Dr. Mayer correctly observes that in their rush to become relevant to business, which often reimburses or subsidizes the high tuition fees of profitable MBA programs, business schools have forgotten the academic nature of being part of the academy. "Business education is not or should not fundamentally be about 'how to' manage a business. It is as much about 'why' and 'what'," Dr. Mayer writes.

Business schools need to be "more in line with what universities traditionally teach," he proclaims.

Up until this point, he is making a good argument about what a business education should be - more academic than practical training - but doesn't yet explain why business schools belong within the university.

He uses the management degree as his example degree program. Management skills require "a fundamental understanding of the science, medicine, politics and law," Dr. Mayer writes. He notes that businesses cannot teach these fundamental skills on their own as those in business do not have the specialization to understand these skills as well as those immersed within the academy.

Management, in other words, is a skill that requires wide-ranging knowledge gathered from several disciplines. But here is where we differ: Nothing in his argument justifies the existence of business schools as standalone faculties with their own faculty and dean.

Business is nothing more than a glorified social science. It is a department masquerading as a faculty.

Most subjects taught in business schools could be better taught by academics housed within the departments of their discipline - merely with a specialization of how the discipline relates to the business world. There is nothing academic (learning to be an accountant is not academic, it is practical and belongs in colleges) taught by business schools that could not be housed within the existing disciplines of social science.

The Saïd Business School dean is correct that business schools are going to continue "to expand to greater heights." Not because they are actually becoming truly academic - they are not. They will expand only because they are profitable units within the money-hungry modern university.

More on this topic: The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece about the push to increase the liberal arts content of the undergraduate business degree. 

Tagged with school, separate, business, faculty | Comments (21) |

All-boys’ school may get more young men past high school

Joey Coleman, October 21, 2009 at 12:19 PM

I've always had a keen interest in education policy. While still in high school, I sat on four public school board committees and ran for public school board trustee. I've stay connected with my local school ever since.

 

It's for this reason that I wasn't surprised to learn Dr. Chris Spence, education director of Canada's largest public school board, is proposing the creation of an all-male school and more "boy-friendly" classrooms to address male underachievement.

 

I had the opportunity to meet Dr. Spence during his time as director of the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board, the position he held prior to taking over the Toronto District School Board. During his time in Hamilton, he initiated many programs in our underachieving elementary schools and reached out to the community for support. I noticed increased engagement among the children in my home area of East Hamilton and have heard, from my former peers raising their own grade-school age children, much positive feedback about these initiatives.

 

I lived in the poorest areas of Hamilton growing up and went to some of the least-achieving, as measured by standardized tests and drop-out rates, schools in the public system.

 

The accessibility problem among the lower socio-economic classes is not tuition fees; it's a lack of educational achievement in primary and secondary school. Most members of my peer group with the marks and desire to enter university have been able to do so. Many choose not to. I chose to not attend post-secondary education immediately following high school for numerous reasons reflective of my background.

 

An all-boys school has the potential to address many of the socio-economic barriers that are preventing the lower classes from obtaining a post-secondary education. The problem with "accessibility" for the "poor" is not tuition fees and lowering fees will have little impact on solving the problem.

 

If we as a society are serious about class mobility, we need to be investing and innovating within our elementary schools. Here's hoping Spence's proposal is approved, properly funded and we start seeing the results in a few years time.

Tagged with school, men, post-secondary, mobility, socio-economic, accessibility, all-boys, barriers, education, class | Comments (12) |