Professor Calls for Abolishing Business Schools, Saying They Favor Profit Over Public Life

Marquis writes that the outcome is not a case of institutional failure. “That’s not the institution failing,” he writes. “Sadly, it’s the institution working.”

He argues that business school does more than confer skills and contacts. “Business school doesn’t just hand out skills and a network,” Marquis writes. “It quietly reshapes how people see the world, rewarding dealmaking, simplification, and optimization for financial metrics, while workers and communities become afterthoughts.”

Marquis points to research suggesting that business-school-trained CEOs often benefit shareholders at the expense of workers, without delivering measurable improvements in company performance. “When a business-school-trained CEO takes over a firm, wages fall and labor’s share of income drops, with no gain in productivity,” he writes. “In both the U.S. and Denmark, what passes for the ‘managerial skill’ of business-school graduates turns out to be a transfer of wealth away from workers and toward shareholders.”

He adds: “Students deserve better than a machine that narrows their sense of what’s possible.”