HBS Responds to Article

With the economy continuing in a state of peril, business schools—including Harvard’s—have started to take heat from critics.

Analysts and academics have started to doubt the education given to students at business schools, and have asserted that a better business education could perhaps have helped diminish fallout from the current economic crisis.

An article in The New York Times earlier this week noted that common complaints have included a focus on approaches that are overly scientific, and that business schools do not produce entrepreneurs or leaders, only individuals intent on making financial gains.

The article also noted complaints that business schools instruct students by having them solve unrealistic problems in a short amount of time.

Harvard Business School was repeatedly referenced in the article, but many students at the Business School said they disagree with such sentiments.

“Yes, we are taught to solve problems in as little as 3 hours, but this gives us more of a realization of the true complexities rather than giving us the unrealistic ambition that we can solve real problems in that time,” said Jason V. Bhardwaj, a student at the Business School. “The school errs on the side of giving us less time per problem to expose us to a variety of situations.”

Shweta Agarwal, also an MBA candidate, agreed.

“HBS provides us with a general management education with required courses in leadership, corporate responsibility and accountability,” she said. “The trend of some students selecting Wall Street over management in industry was a result of the market, not the education.”

Faculty members added that the Business School has taken many steps in the past to revise the curriculum and address previous concerns.

“When it comes to issues of leadership, values, ethics, you can have standalone courses and you can embed the issues into discipline based courses like finance, marketing and strategy,”

In light of these reports, Benjamin G. Edelman—an assistant professor at the Business School—said that he sees a new opportunity to emphasize the school’s revised curriculum.

“My students see an opportunity here, much to their credit, to re–double their efforts–to start companies or join startups where just a year ago they would primarily have joined multinationals firms almost by default,” he said.