440,000 Students in American Business Schools

Writing at National Review, Conrad Black points out that too many resources are devoted to studying business, a curriculum he calls “not an academic subject.”

The most frightening statistic in America, apart from the current and accumulated deficits and the numbers of the unemployed and underemployed, is that there are 440,000 students in the country’s business schools. Business is not an academic subject and few of the most capable businessmen, financiers, or industrialists are business-administration graduates. But the self-consciousness of businessmen at their inability to claim to be a learned profession drives them to devote billions of dollars of their shareholders’ and their own money to academic cathedrals of business study. Very few of the professors in them have ever actually run anything or made any money, and most of the curriculum is completely superfluous to a successful career in commerce. The resources should be devoted to giving back to society teachers who can impart to students the ability to read, write, and pass a grade-three arithmetic test of 50 years ago. As standards have collapsed in the public-sector education system, and an economic recovery fails to begin in an economy waterlogged with people pursuing redundant activities, the president continues to distract the population rather than lead it.