The Economist: New Graduation Skills - Business Schools
As business schools start to teach more ethics and practical skills, enrolments are climbing again.
“TOYOTA would have been proud of our just-in-time implementation,” claims Joel Podolny, dean of the Yale School of Management—surely the first time the head of an academic institution has, without a hint of irony, used a factory-floor metaphor for speed and efficiency to describe his ivory tower. In March 2006 the faculty voted to change its MBA curriculum fundamentally. By September they were teaching it.
Instead of the well-worn method of teaching functional subjects, such as marketing, strategy, accounting and so forth, students who are now completing their first year at Yale are taught with eight courses that each address different themes, such as the customer, the employee, the investor, competitors, business and society, and innovation.
Yale has gone further than any Ivy League business school in shaking up its curriculum, but it is not alone in making changes. Stanford's Graduate School of Business, which many reckon is second only to Harvard Business School (HBS) among the elite of the global schools, will introduce sweeping changes in September. Indeed, most of the leading American business schools, including HBS, have upgraded their courses by some level since 2002. That was the year when the business of business education looked to be heading for trouble.
Five years ago, business schools, particularly in America, came under attack from all sides. Fairly or not, they took some of the blame for the corporate scandals that erupted at firms such as Enron and WorldCom....
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