A new trend?
For hundreds years, people start companies; build them without any formal training. By the 20th century, the complexity of modern companies demanded that managers must be trained to follow a number of standards and procedures to manage large companies. In 1908, HarvardUniversity created the first Master of Business Administration (MBA) to fill the need to bring professional education to big companies. The MBA program standardized all essential elements of operating a company that managers needed to know such as cost, revenue, accounting, finance, strategy, operations and personnel management etc.
For years, the Master of Business Administration (MBA) is the “Dream degree” for students as it opens opportunities for people who want to go into management positions. However today with so many business graduates could not find work and the future of finance and banking industry is uncertain, the new trend is to train students to create their own business instead. According to a study by the Global Association of Business Schools, more business students are given up the hope of getting management job with big company and interest in becoming an entrepreneur so MBA programs are switching from management focus to entrepreneurship focus.
According to the Global Association of Business School, entrepreneurship has become more popular in MBA programs recently and many business schools are reducing finance and management classes and replace them with entrepreneurship classes. A business professor lamented: “With the financial crisis, banking and finance degrees are no longer attracted students, especially when there are so many unemployed graduates. Today most students want to be their own boss by starting their own company.” However, many entrepreneurship programs are still following the traditional method of lecturing, develop business plan, and economic theories rather than actual practice where students solve real situation. Many existing MBA programs are adding soft skills classes such as communication, team building, and sales marketing to the training programs.
However, there are many critics of this change as entrepreneurs is not a theory to be taught but an actual practice of developing skills sets, such as opportunity recognition, market testing, customers development, and venture startup. To do that, business skills are not enough but it must be combined with other skills in science and technology to develop technology startups. This multidisciplinary approach has been used successful at CMU and Stanford where group of students from different areas such as engineering, sciences, technology, and business work together to come up with new ideas and start their own company.
For several decades, the two most popular classes at Harvard are “Introductory Economics” and “Financial management” but since 2009, the “Introductory computer science” has become the most popular among students. It seemed that every student is taking this course. Although “Introductory economics” is still popular and ranked second but “Financial management” is being replaced by another course. A professor said: “I am not surprised why many students are interested in computer class because technology is where the jobs are and where future opportunities are. But I am surprised that “Classical Chinese Ethical and political theory” is becoming the third popular class at Harvard. Why more students want to learn about Confucius, Lao Tzu, Meng Tzu, Chang Tzu, and Sun Tzu and how they solve problems of China thousand years ago?” A student explained: “This course give us something new, it is a “life changing” materials that we never been exposed to. We feel that after decades of greed, scams, dishonesty that brings us the financial crisis, people is realizing that we need ethics, we need something to live by, and we need to go back to justice, moral and ethics.”
It is important to note that what happen at Harvard often influences other universities as this top school often sets the trends. It seems that there is an increasing realization among students, both at Harvard and other universities, that the MBA trainings have placed so much attention to finance, profits but forget about ethics and other moral aspects which resulted in a generation of greedy managements, dishonest bankers and financiers. They have created disasters such as the collapsing of the housing market, the financial crisis that is now spreading and creates economic recessions all over the world. That is why training programs must go back and pay attention to the good of the entire society instead of the wealth of a few and the current trend only reflect what the younger generations are thinking.”
The question is what computer science and classical ethics will bring to future generation? How does something very old like classical books of Confucius and Lao Tzu can be taught with something new such as Big Data and Cloud computing? As MBA program is moving toward entrepreneurship, what are these future entrepreneurs will do? A student explained: “We want to become someone like Bill Gates and donate our money to charity just like what he did. For years we watched the older generation focused on greed and getting rich by doing many bad things to people and we do not want to follow that foot step. We want to be difference, we want to do something useful, and we want to change the world to be better by applying technology as a solution to society's problems rather than to get rich.”
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
