Reply to WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Since when did people go to business school expecting learning? If they wanted to be intellectually engaged, they should have considered getting a degree in a real discipline. [/quote]

PP.  People tend to be really nasty about the intellectual value of business school.  However, it can be insightful for people who do the work and are there to learn.  It's quite true that many people use business school as a way to increase their pay and get better jobs.  But it can be more than that.

It does feel like a generalist degree in the same way that a non-STEM liberal arts degree does.  There can be a lot of reading and essay tests.  A lot of class discussion, similar to literature classes. It felt familiar to me as an undergrad econ major.

I had briefly considered getting a PhD in medieval history.  But I wanted to be employable, LOL.  I do not feel like I sacrificed intellectually even though I never went deep into any arcane subjects like medieval French and I never wrote a thesis.  I can live with that.  There was never a single scholarly topic that I wanted to devote a huge amount of time to.  That is another reason why I did not choose a PhD path.

Having had a couple disappointing courses at B-school myself (mainly in Finance where it's hard to retain faculty because they get better pay in industry), I have a feeling I understand what is going on at Stanford.  The school has been babying the students and they are capable of much more.  It's kind of funny the students put the admin on blast.[/quote]

Schools have been babying students for the last twenty-five years or so in response to helicopter and snowplow parenting. While the retreat from the Socratic method is evidence of this shift, I wonder to what degree students' complaints actually reflect a greater demand for spoon feeding and a lack of analytical skills rather than a lack of actual teaching (the analytical abilities of my current undergraduate students are quite weak compared to those of my students whom I taught in the early years of the present century for an amalgam of reasons, including the fact that no one reads outside of class; the internet and smartphones have ruined attention spans; no one knows how to take notes; everyone demands an A for work that at the beginning of my career would have earned a C at best).
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