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下一场商业革命
美国商学院正在重塑MBA (Master of Business Administration工商管理硕士)是时候了
(经济学人 2019/Nov./2 期)
去年10月，Salesforce的老板马克•贝尼奥夫(Marc Benioff)访问纽约时，将Facebook比作香烟，并支持提高企业税，以解决旧金山的无家可归问题。如果说对一位亿万富翁企业家来说，诋毁一位科技巨头同行和为收税员喝彩还不够异端邪说的话，那么贝尼奥夫则把矛头对准了美国的管理教育。它“规划”学生更看重利润而不是公共利益。他指出，这与“新资本主义”格格不入。
许多院长同意。杜克大学福库商学院(Fuqua School of Business)的威廉•博尔丁(WilliamBoulding)表示:“我们需要学生思考商业在社会中所扮演的角色，尤其是在资本主义受到攻击的时刻。”哈佛商学院(HBS)的尼廷•诺里亚(Nitin Nohria)报告了年轻的校友和即将入学的班级是如何希望“工作场所能反映目标和价值观”的。斯坦福大学商学院(GSB)的乔纳森•莱文谈到，商学院有责任认识到企业行为的社会后果。“企业、领导人和所有者需要采取行动，恢复信任，”他吟诵道。
美国商学院仍在我们的年度全球MBA排行榜中占据主导地位。但是这个行业正在被撼动。根据行业协会研究生入学管理委员会(GMAC)的数据，今年美国MBA课程的申请者比去年减少了7%。在全日制两年制MBA中，从东海岸到西海岸，近四分之三都出现了下滑。即使是最著名的 (illustrious)商学院也未能幸免:位于波士顿的哈佛商学院和位于帕洛阿尔托的斯坦福大学商学院的申请人数都下降了6%左右。商学院面临着来自海外和在线课程的日益激烈的竞争——而且，正如贝尼奥夫先生的评论所暗示的那样，还存在着关于课程设置僵化 (hidebound)的问题。波士顿大学奎斯特罗姆商学院(QuestromSchool of Business)院长苏珊•福涅尔(Susan Fournier)承认:“我们正受到左派，右派两方的干扰。”
当管理教育在20世纪60年代蓬勃发展时，美国学校主要教授美国学生。随着20世纪80年代和90年代世界经济的全球化，美国的课程设置和学生群体也随之全球化。GMAC的负责人桑吉特•乔弗拉(Sangeet Chowfla)现在发现了“第三波”:美国以外学校的改善让外国学生在离家更近的地方学习(以及未来的雇主)。许多学校提供更便宜的一年制MBA课程，这种课程在欧洲很流行，但在欧洲以外地区并不多见。在最新一轮申请周期中，美国四分之三的两年制MBA项目的海外申请人数量有所下降，而申请亚洲商学院的人数从2017年到2018年上升了9%。最近美国反移民情绪的上升加速了这一趋势。
美国人对MBA的热情也在降温。超过一半的美国学校报告国内申请者人数减少。飞涨的学费远远超过了通货膨胀的速度，这让他们和外国人一样望而却步。一流的MBA课程将花费你20多万美元(包括生活费)。即使有经济资助，许多学生毕业时仍背负着10万美元的债务。当经济繁荣、劳动力市场吃紧时，读MBA 比放弃两年薪金支票的机会成本更高。根据另一个行业组织——高等商学院协会(Associationto Advance Collegiate School of Business)的数据，需求疲软导致美国全日制MBA课程数量在2014年至2018年间减少了近十分之一。
宾夕法尼亚大学沃顿商学院院长杰弗里•加勒特(Geoffrey Garrett)认为，对质量的追求正使像他这样的顶尖院校及其毕业生受益。加上非工资补偿，校友们往往能在几年内收回投资。不包括签约奖金，美国五所最有可能最高收入的学校毕业生的平均底薪为13.9万美元。
咨询公司和投资银行历来是最热心的MBA招聘机构，它们声称，自己对精英学位持有者的兴趣并没有减弱。奥纬咨询(Oliver Wyman) 28岁的顾问克斯特亚•西莫年科(Kostya Simonenko) 请假攻读MBA，解释称，一份著名的MBA学位“为你的职业生涯奠定了基础”。(奥纬咨询支付他在哥伦比亚商学院(Columbia Business School)的课程学费) 过去，硅谷对MBA毕业生不屑一顾，认为他们拿的薪水过高，一无所知。如今，硅谷对他们的敌意已有所减弱。随着初创公司成长为大公司，他们需要管理人员来帮助管理，而不仅仅是软件工程师来运行代码。GMAC今年对招聘人员进行的一项调查发现，80%的科技公司计划招聘MBA，与咨询公司(82%)和金融公司(77%)持平。
然而，即便是最好的学校，也无法抵挡商科教育的冲击 (buffeting)。全球竞争和新技术平台降低了高质量课程的成本结构。福涅尔表示，这迫使“对MBA的价值主张进行清算”。
作为清算MBA价值的一部分，Questrom已经与edx(一家大型在线教育公司)合作，以仅仅24000美元的价格提供一个完整的在线MBA学位，这还不到其在校同等费用的三分之一。正如福涅尔所说，与其让别人这么做，不如自己侵蚀自己 (cannibalise)。麻省理工学院(MIT)斯隆管理学院(Sloan School of Management)在供应链管理和金融等领域提供了类似的价格低廉的在线课程，被称为MicroMaster。这些授予证书，但如果学生有一天决定攻读一个完整的学位，学分将被授予。在线教育平台2u正在为一些混合型MBA学位引入延迟学费计划。它将与商学院合作伙伴共同承担前期成本;学生只有在找到工作后才会付钱。
改变的不仅仅是MBA课程的授课方式。他们所教的也是如此。许多初露头角的资本家同意贝尼奥夫的观点，并要求教授超越股东价值至上的商业知识。来自德国的斯坦福大学千禧一代MBA学生路易莎•格斯特纳(Luisa Gerstner)指出，可持续资本主义在欧洲商学院中扮演着更为核心的角色。她的美国同学朱莉娅•奥斯特曼(Julia Osterman)哀叹道，尽管课程中有一些社会、环境和伦理方面的主题，但核心课程仍然“太过金融101”。
他们的一些教授不太确定。哈佛商学院(HBS)的一位老人估计，三分之一的教职工(以及许多年长的校友)认为，拥抱可爱的“利益相关者资本主义”是对政治正确性的一种不严谨的讨好。博尔丁承认，这肯定会引入许多灰色地带。但他表示，学校至少可以为学生提供“做出选择的框架”。杜克大学(Duke)开设了一门名为“差异世界中的资本主义与共同目标”(Capitalismand Common Purpose in A World of Differences)的新课程。哈佛商学院的“领导和企业责任”(深入探究了“业务向更广泛的责任体系的嵌入式”) 为一年级要求课程，用权衡超越财务指标的道德，看日本政府养老金投资基金之类的研究案例。
重新编码学院
课程设置也在以不那么崇高的方式进行变革。高管教育每年为精英学校带来1亿至1.5亿美元的收入。为一半的高管教育提供部分或全部资金的雇主们希望它能传授一些技术技能，作为回应。哥伦比亚商学院(Columbia Business School)新任院长(同时也是一名训练有素的工程师)科斯蒂斯•马格拉拉斯(Costis Maglaras)等院长正将数据、分析和编程课程安排在时间表上。随着它们的受欢迎程度的提高，它们可能会取代那些较为乏味的学科。哥伦比亚大学曾经每学年开设几门有关债务市场的课程，但现在可能每学年开设一门。与此同时，学生们蜂拥去上编程课。马格拉拉斯先生说，这个想法并不是要把商业类型转变成科研人员，而是要让他们做好与技术人员一起工作和管理技术人员的准备。一家大型咨询公司的招聘人员肯定，精通技术的MBA“非常有吸引力”。
加州大学伯克利分校(University of California, Berkeley)哈斯商学院(HaasBusiness School)前院长理查德•莱昂斯(Richard Lyons)认为，将终身职业教育作为一种服务是未来的发展方向。密歇根大学(University of Michigan)罗斯商学院(Ross School ofBusiness)院长斯科特•德鲁(Scott DeRue)为校友提供免费高管教育。曾在哈佛商学院任教的管理学大师高约翰(John Kao)认为:“新东西将来自起义者，而不是大型MBA学校。”他希望制定培训基准和标准化抄本，使技能便于携带并得到普遍认可。
在拥有或许是受尊崇的MBA学位的哈佛商学院，诺里亚承认，传统MBA课程的市场正在萎缩。他的学校冻结了学费，这是时代的一个标志。他认为，在线教育的“打散者”的数量将大幅增加，他们将“知道、做和存在”分开。他表示，假以时日，它们将与哈佛商学院这样的“捆绑式商学院”会聚在一起。他认为，管理教育非但不会崩溃，反而会因此变得更加富有。
English contents:
The next business revolution
American business schools are reinventing the MBA
About time
On a visit to New York in October Marc Benioff, boss of Salesforce, compared Facebook to cigarettes and backed a corporate tax hike to deal with homelessness in San Francisco. If badmouthing a fellow technology giant and cheering the taxman were not heterodox enough for a billionaire entrepreneur, Mr Benioff laid into American management education. It “programmes” students to favour profit over the public good. This, he noted, is out of step with “the new capitalism”.
Many deans concur. “We need our students to be thoughtful about the role of business in society, particularly at a moment in time when capitalism is coming under attack,” says William Boulding of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. Nitin Nohria of Harvard Business School (HBS) reports how younger alumni and incoming classes want “the place of work to reflect purpose and values”. Jonathan Levin of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB) talks of business schools’ responsibility to recognise the societal consequences of corporate actions. “Corporations, their leaders and owners need to act to restore trust,” he intones.
America’s business schools still dominate our annual ranking of the world’s top mbas. But the industry is being shaken up. According to the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), an industry association, American mba programmes received 7% fewer applicants this year than last. Nearly three-quarters of full-time, two-year mba programmes reported declines from coast to coast. Not even the most illustrious ones were spared: HBS (located in Boston) and Stanford’s GSB (in Palo Alto) both saw applications dip by 6% or so. Schools face growing competition from overseas and online programmes—and, as Mr Benioff’s critique implies, questions over hidebound curriculums. “We’re being disrupted left, right and centre,” confesses Susan Fournier, dean of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
When management education boomed in the 1960s, American schools taught mostly American students. As the world economy globalised in the 1980s and 1990s, so too did American curriculums and student bodies. Sangeet Chowfla, who heads gmac, now discerns a “third wave”: improved schools outside America are letting foreign students study closer to home (and future employers). Many offer cheaper one-year mbas, popular in Europe but uncommon across the pond. Whereas three in four two-year mba programmes in America saw declines in overseas applicants in the latest application cycle, numbers applying to Asian business schools rose by 9% from 2017 to 2018. A recent uptick in America’s anti-immigrant sentiment is accelerating the trend.
Americans, too, are cooling on mbas. More than half of American schools report fewer domestic applicants. Soaring tuition costs, which have far outpaced inflation, put them off as much as they do foreigners. A top-notch mba will set you back more than $200,000 (including living costs). Even with financial aid, many students are saddled with $100,000 debts at graduation. The opportunity cost of forgoing two years’ worth of paycheques is higher when the economy is booming and labour markets are tight. Weak demand has caused the number of full-time mba programmes in America to fall by nearly a tenth between 2014 and 2018, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, another industry body.
Geoffrey Garrett, dean of the Wharton School, at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that a flight to quality is benefiting top institutions like his—and their graduates. Add non-wage compensation and alumni often recoup their investments in a few years. Not counting signing bonuses, the average base salary for graduates of the five American schools with the highest earning potential was $139,000.
Consultancies and investment banks, historically the keenest MBA recruiters, claim their appetite for holders of elite degrees has not diminished. A prestigious mba “puts a floor on your career”, explains Kostya Simonenko, a 28-year-old consultant on leave from Oliver Wyman (which is paying for his course at Columbia Business School). Silicon Valley, which used to dismiss mbas as overpaid know-nothings, has become less hostile. As startups grow into large corporations, they need managers to help run things, not just software engineers to run code. A survey of recruiters by gmac this year found that 80% of technology companies planned to hire mbas, on a par with consultancies (82%) and financial firms (77%).
Even the finest schools, though, are not sheltered from the forces buffeting business education. Global competition and new technology platforms enable a lower cost structure for the delivery of high-quality courses. This forces “a reckoning of the mba value proposition”, says Ms Fournier.
As part of that reckoning, Questrom has teamed up with edx, a big online-education firm, to offer a full MBA degree online for just $24,000, less than a third of the cost of its on-campus equivalent. Better to cannibalise yourself than let others do it, as Ms Fournier puts it. mit’s Sloan School of Management provides similarly affordable bundles of online courses, dubbed MicroMasters, in areas like supply-chain management and finance. These grant certificates but the credits will be honoured if a student one day decides to pursue a full degree. 2u, an online-education platform, is introducing deferred-tuition schemes for some hybrid MBA degrees. It will share the upfront costs with its business-school partners; students will pay only when they get a job.
It is not just how MBA courses are taught that is changing. So, too, is what they teach. Many budding woke capitalists agree with Mr Benioff—and demand to be taught business beyond the primacy of shareholder value. At Stanford Luisa Gerstner, a millennial MBA student from Germany, notes that sustainable capitalism plays a more central role in European schools. Julia Osterman, her American classmate, laments how, despite some social, environmental and ethical topics in its curriculum, core classes are still “too Finance 101”.
Some of their professors are not so sure. One greybeard at hbs estimates that a third of its faculty (and many older alumni) view the embrace of cuddly “stakeholder capitalism” as an unrigorous sop to political correctness. It certainly introduces lots of grey areas, Mr Boulding concedes. But, he says, schools can at least provide students with “frameworks for making choices”. A new course at Duke is entitled “Capitalism and Common Purpose in a World of Differences”. hbs has made “Leadership and Corporate Accountability” (which delves into “the responsibilities of business to the broader system in which it is embedded”) a required first-year course, with case studies weighing up things like the morality of looking beyond financial metrics at Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund.
Recoding academies
Curriculums are being transformed in less lofty ways, too. Employers, who partly or wholly bankroll half of all executive education, which earns elite schools between $100m and $150m a year, want it to impart technical skills. In response, deans such as Costis Maglaras, the newish head of Columbia Business School (and an engineer by training), are bolting courses on data, analytics and programming onto the timetable. As their popularity rises, they may displace stodgier subjects. Columbia used to offer several courses on debt markets but now offers perhaps one each academic year. Meanwhile, students have flocked to coding classes. The idea is not to turn business types into boffins but to prepare them to work with and manage technical staff, says Mr Maglaras. A recruiter for a big consultancy affirms that tech-savvy MBAs are “very attractive”.
Richard Lyons, former dean of the Haas Business School at the University of California, Berkeley, sees the future in providing lifelong professional education as a service: “Give alumni know-how on demand, searchable online.” Scott DeRue, dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, is giving alumni tuition-free access to executive education. “The new stuff will come from insurgents, not the big MBA schools,” thinks John Kao, a management guru who formerly taught at HBS. He wants training benchmarks and standardised transcripts to make skills portable and universally recognised.
At HBS, home to perhaps the most hallowed mba, Mr Nohria accepts that the market for its traditional offering is shrinking. In a sign of the times, his school has frozen tuition fees. He sees a dramatic expansion for “unbundlers” of online education, who “separate knowing, doing and being”. In time, he says, they will converge with “bundlers” like hbs. Far from collapsing, he reckons, management education will the richer for it.