Anonymous
Post 07/24/2025 10:07     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Spouse got an MBA about a decade ago and based on the amount of homework there was a ton of academic work.

Now spouse didn't have a finance or accounting background...
Anonymous
Post 07/24/2025 09:56     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote: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.


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.


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).
Anonymous
Post 07/24/2025 00:01     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Anonymous wrote: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.


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.
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 23:48     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Anonymous wrote:I think the theory is that you learn a little bit of everything so that you are smart enough to ask good questions. You will not be an expert at accounting but can look at a financial statement and know if something looks off. Same with stats. I'm not arguing whether this is right or wrong, just stating how they look at it.

Though I have found that because of their ridiculous obsession with cases, HBS alums are really bad at accounting and stats. Cases are great for strategy and marketing and some amount of finance, but they are awful for more quantitative disciplines.


A PP. What I found interesting at my top b-school, which was not HBS but used HBS cases, is that "corporate strategy" is often a lot of b.s. I discovered that cost accounting delivered the knowledge I expected to receive from my MBA. So I took extra upper division cost accounting electives. They were great.
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 23:20     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Anonymous wrote:Who is “poets and quants”? Is this your online blog, OP?

It’s a pretty well known business blog?
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 23:18     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Anonymous wrote: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.
p

Exactly
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 19:36     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote: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.

This. Business administration isn't a thing you can learn.

Sure you do. You learn about marketing, sales, finance, a bit of accounting. It's not "academic", but you do learn stuff.


It's not thing anybody *teaches* you. You learn by experience and reading the manuals.
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 19:36     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Anonymous wrote:Who is “poets and quants”? Is this your online blog, OP?


It's an "MBA Blog".
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 19:04     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
No surprise, college is the new middle school, grad school is the new high school. Everyone gets As everywhere.
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 18:42     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
I think the theory is that you learn a little bit of everything so that you are smart enough to ask good questions. You will not be an expert at accounting but can look at a financial statement and know if something looks off. Same with stats. I'm not arguing whether this is right or wrong, just stating how they look at it.

Though I have found that because of their ridiculous obsession with cases, HBS alums are really bad at accounting and stats. Cases are great for strategy and marketing and some amount of finance, but they are awful for more quantitative disciplines.
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 18:08     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Anonymous wrote: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.

These people should've considered law school or public policy
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 18:04     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote: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.

This. Business administration isn't a thing you can learn.

Sure you do. You learn about marketing, sales, finance, a bit of accounting. It's not "academic", but you do learn stuff.


I got my first work experience in international business from my MBA program. I did primary research in Eastern Europe and had an internship with an F500 in Russia. That helped me qualify for a full-time job that let me live in Singapore for 3 months and be the first known person in my family to fly all the way around the earth. Not too shabby.
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 17:58     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote: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.

This. Business administration isn't a thing you can learn.

Sure you do. You learn about marketing, sales, finance, a bit of accounting. It's not "academic", but you do learn stuff.
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 17:49     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
Anonymous wrote: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.

This. Business administration isn't a thing you can learn.
Anonymous
Post 07/23/2025 17:49     Subject: WE’RE NOT LEARNING ANYTHING’: Stanford GSB Students Sound The Alarm Over Academics
First and second responses showing they know absolutely zero about the business world.