[tw]

Originally Posted by TGRR

Feeling a little used, are we?

The NY Times is now asking an obvious question on 14 Mar 2009:

JOHN Thain has one. So do Richard Fuld, Stanley O’Neal and Vikram Pandit. For that matter, so does John Paulson, the hedge fund kingpin.

Yes, all five have fat bank accounts, even now, and all have made their share of headlines. But these current and former giants of finance also are all card-carrying M.B.A.’s.

The master’s of business administration, a gateway credential throughout corporate America, is especially coveted on Wall Street; in recent years, top business schools have routinely sent more than 40 percent of their graduates into the world of finance.

But with the economy in disarray and so many financial firms in free fall, analysts, and even educators themselves, are wondering if the way business students are taught may have contributed to the most serious economic crisis in decades.

Instead of being viewed as long-term economic stewards, he said, managers came to be seen as mainly as the agents of the owners — the shareholders — and responsible for maximizing shareholder wealth.

“A kind of market fundamentalism took hold in business education,” Professor Khurana said. “The new logic of shareholder primacy absolved management of any responsibility for anything other than financial results.”

Wondering? How can people trained to stifle innovation and trained to concepts advocated by the mafia only cause wonder?

Business education is big business, too. Some 146,000 graduate degrees in business were awarded in 2005-06, roughly one-fourth of the 594,000 graduate degrees awarded that school year, according to the Education Department.

Once Leigh University was nicknamed the Engineers. Lehigh is diminishing their expensive engineering school and expanding their MBA education. MBAs also cost less to educate - cost controls. So Lehigh changed their name from "Engineers" to "Mountain Hawks". Actually knowing how things work is no longer glorious, honored, or financially rewarding.

A study of cheating among graduate students, published in 2006 in the journal Academy of Management Learning & Education, found that 56 percent of all M.B.A. students cheated regularly — more than in any other discipline. The authors attributed that to “perceived peer behavior”

The purpose of a company is profit ... just like the mafia. How many called 'justified with facts' criticisms of MBAs a rant? They were only doing as trained.