In a recent guest essay in The New York Times (“I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down,” Oct. 18), Chris Marquis called for the abolition of business schools. Professor Marquis has spent more than 20 years teaching in business schools, so his argument deserves a serious answer. I should say up front where I stand. I hold an MBA, and I have spent more than two decades helping people decide whether to pursue one. I have a stake in this debate. I also have a long view of who actually enrolls and what happens to them.
Professor Marquis gets some things right. Too many students arrive with big ambitions and leave thinking only about McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. Case studies can be too tidy, too flattering to the companies that approve them and too focused on winners. And a single ethics elective does not change a culture.
But every problem he describes is a reason to reform business schools, not to tear them down. And his proposed replacement, looked at closely, is a business school with a different name.
The Evidence Points to Reform, Not Shutdown
Start with the 2025 academic study at the center of his argument. Daron Acemoglu and his co-authors found that firms appointing managers with business degrees cut wages by about six percent in the United States within five years, with no gain in productivity, sales or investment. It is a well written paper, and business schools should take it seriously. But it is worth noting that the authors find larger effects for managers who earned their degrees after 1980, when shareholder primacy and “lean corporation” doctrine took hold in business schools. They point to those ideas, not to management education itself, as the likely cause.
That is a finding about curriculum. If what business schools taught in the 1980s changed how graduates treated workers, then what they teach now can change it back. The study is an argument for teaching differently. It is not proof that teaching management is harmful.
The same goes for the career herding Professor Marquis laments. Business school students pursue consulting and finance roles because those firms recruit heavily on campus and pay salaries high enough to help graduates repay six-figure loans. Closing business schools would not change those incentives. The consulting firms and banks would simply recruit somewhere else.
His own examples make my case. He praises Stuart Hart’s program at the University of Vermont, where sustainability runs through the entire curriculum. That program is an MBA, offered by Vermont’s Grossman School of Business. He also describes a required sustainability course he introduced at Cambridge that pushed future bankers and consultants into real debate. Both happened inside business schools. They show the institution can change.
Finally, consider his alternative: “schools for organizing” that study co-ops, unions and social movements alongside corporations. Anyone who wants to run a co-op, a hospital or a clean-energy start-up still needs to read a balance sheet, price a product, manage a supply chain and lead people through hard decisions. A school that teaches those skills is a business school. Broadening what it teaches is a worthy goal. Renaming it does nothing.
Good Management Is a Public Good
Professor Marquis writes that business schools, unlike medical and law schools, serve only a private good. I disagree. Good management is one of the most underrated public goods we have.
The economists Nicholas Bloom of Stanford and John Van Reenen of the London School of Economics have spent nearly two decades measuring management quality across thousands of organizations worldwide. Their work finds that management practices explain a quarter to a third of productivity gaps between and within countries. In a U.S. Census survey of 35,000 manufacturing plants, management accounted for more than 20 percent of the variation in productivity. In hospitals, better management is linked to better patient outcomes. Whether an organization sets clear goals, tracks results and hires, pays and promotes well is not a private matter. It decides whether patients survive, whether workers keep their jobs and whether good missions succeed.
Professor Marquis knows this. In his essay, he describes students who are “nonprofit leaders who have watched good missions fail for want of good management.” That is exactly the gap an MBA fills. The engineer who wants to commercialize clean energy needs to raise capital, build a team and get a product to market. Passion does not do that. Training does.
The degree also opens doors that would otherwise stay closed. For a career switcher, a first-generation professional or someone without an elite network, a top MBA is one of the few structured routes into leadership. These programs pull talent from around the world into the same room and connect it to opportunity.
They also produce builders. At Harvard Business School, a record share of the Class of 2025 chose to start their own companies rather than take a job, according to the school. Some of those companies will fail. Some will become the clean-energy, health care and climate firms that Professor Marquis says our economy needs.
Fix the Curriculum, Keep the School
None of this means business schools should carry on unchanged. Professor Marquis is right that case studies should include failures, dissenting voices and the workers and communities affected by a decision. Sustainability and ethics belong in the core curriculum, not tacked on at the end. Schools should measure themselves by what their graduates build, not only by what they earn.
Those are reforms worth fighting for, and many schools are already making them. They will not happen if we close the institutions where future managers are trained. They will happen if people like Professor Marquis stay inside and keep pushing.
Competition can help here. Nothing stops a university from building an MBA around the questions Professor Marquis cares about: who bears the costs of business decisions, how companies are held accountable and how co-ops and other organizations compare with the shareholder corporation. If students want that education, applications will show it, and other schools will follow. Vermont’s program suggests the demand already exists. Letting applicants choose is a better test of his ideas than closing the schools that do things differently.
He ends by saying his students lack “an institution that is worthy of their better impulses.” I agree that they deserve one. But we will not build it by tearing down the schools where those students are trying to learn. We should make those schools better.
