Mark Davis is a New York company director with that most American of qualifications, an MBA. When Mr Davis was in his mid-thirties, his then employer British Telecom paid for him to return to the classroom to do the two-year, full-time course at Baruch College in Manhattan.
A decade later, having switched from a job in a large corporate to helping run a tech start-up called Full Stack Academy, Mr Davis wonders why he took so much time out of his career to study leadership and management theory.
“I can read a balance sheet, which is valuable,” he says. “But it is not something that I needed to spend two years of my life doing.”
Business degrees continue to be one of the most sought-after educational credentials with 11.7m applications to business schools each year. This number comes from a combination of average application numbers to schools, as measured by the Graduate Management Admission Council, the owner and administrator of the GMAT admission exam, and the approximately 16,000 schools offering degrees, as recorded by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), the global accreditation body.
But despite being the flagship business qualification, the future of the MBA is under threat from a proliferation of rival courses, opportunities to study online and rising tuition costs. The result is that many of the schools providing the degree worry over what lies ahead.
Universities are concerned, too, given that business schools can be the cash cows of higher education. And it raises the question of where and how many of tomorrow’s business leaders will learn how to manage.