--The danger of corporate thinking in higher education
By Kimmo Alajoutsijärvi, Katariina Juusola and Juha-Antti-Lamberg
Business schools are too eager to emulate the commercial sector
Over the past two decades the emirate of Dubai emerged as a hotspot for the establishment of international business school campuses, only to then see many of these campuses subsequently close their doors or operate with largely empty classrooms as the world financial crisis took hold.
What happened in Dubai was something business faculty spend considerable time writing and teaching about but which they had little success in avoiding – the making and breaking of a bubble. The Dubai business school bubble exposed a disturbing eagerness of schools to emulate the corporate sector in a way that is at odds with their traditions and puts their reputations and finances at risk.
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The lesson of the Dubai bubble is that business schools need to get back to being students and critics of the corporate world, not participants in it. If not, Dubai could turn out to be a portent of a sector-wide depression, an early warning sign of a wider problem in higher education in general and business education in particular.
Most at risk is the US, where a number of developments suggest a late-stage bubble, among them the rapidly rising total sum of student loans, a growing propensity of state governments to shift cost burdens from taxpayers to students and their families, rising unemployment among graduates and growing resistance from parents and students to prices increasing at several times the rate of inflation.
The gloom pervading the business school sector is compounded by perennial problems such as overemphasis on research at the expense of teaching and the questionable practical value of much of that research.
At its peak before the world economic crisis, Dubai hosted the opening of more international branch campuses than anywhere else in the world – 25 business schools from 11 countries, almost two a year, opened their doors in the region between 1995 and 2008.
If it had not been for the world financial crisis, more would have followed, as 54 universities were on the waiting list to open international branch campuses when the economy went into free fall. Some business schools in Dubai went bankrupt and many others were forced to exit or downsize their operations, leaving even those schools that had benefited from the boom with half-empty teaching facilities.
How could the world's top business schools, supposedly founts of business wisdom, have collectively invested in activities that were driven less by economic rationality than by euphoria, mania and panic?
Educate, Empower, Elevate
Prof. Bholanath Dutta
Founder, Convener & President
MTC GLOBAL- Educate, Empower, Elevate
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MTC GLOBAL- Educate, Empower, Elevate
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