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HEADLINE: A split sense of purpose: Professors disagree on the role of business schools. But students have no doubts MICHAEL SKAPINKER

BYLINE: By MICHAEL SKAPINKER

BODY:
Of all the world's businesses, few are as successful as business schools. In the mid-1950s, American business schools were producing about 3,000 MBAs a year. By the late 1990s, they were turning out more than 100,000 a year.

The professors at these schools teach their students that companies thrive when they have a clear purpose. Yet no two professors of business can agree on what the purpose of a business school is. Actually, two professors can occasionally agree, as some of them have written joint articles on the subject. But those two cannot agree with any other two, if the September issue of Learning & Education, a new journal from America's Academy of Management, is anything to go by. Last week, I reported on Learning & Education's account of the way management educators dealt with the September 11 attacks. The second half of the issue is a rollicking debate on the purpose of management education.

Some professors argue that business schools should spend more time preparing managers to meet the demands of today's companies and others argue that they do far too much of that already. Dennis Gioia of Penn State University and Kevin Corley of the University of Indiana say business schools have become too much like businesses and too little like schools, that they are in danger of becoming "handmaidens to corporations".

Jeffrey Pfeffer and Christina Fong of Stanford University argue that business schools teach students how to talk about management rather than practise it. They say the answer is for business schools to model themselves on the professional schools such as medicine, architecture and engineering rather than on the liberal arts departments. The only thing all the contributors agree on is that whatever business schools should be doing, they do it badly.

Russell Ackoff, a pioneer of management education, says that what business schools do is, in any case, quite different from what they say they do.

In an article he wrote when he retired from Wharton, one of the world's top schools, he asked what the principal achievements of business education were.

"I said there were three. The first was to equip students with a vocabulary that enabled them to talk authoritatively about subjects they did not understand. The second was to give students principles that would demonstrate their ability to withstand any amount of disconfirming evidence. The third was to give students a ticket of admission to a job where they could learn something about management." Prof Ackoff recalls that these answers hugely endeared him to the Wharton faculty. He argues that the best way to learn is on the job, preferably in an apprenticeship relationship.

If people learn best on the job, perhaps MBA courses should be abolished. Business educators could then concentrate on bringing practising managers together to reflect on their experiences, learn from each other and catch up on whatever tools of finance, accounting and analysis they have not mastered.

The MBA courses will never be abolished, of course. There are too many people making money out of them. So should business schools attempt to emulate the professional schools, such as medicine, with their tight links between teaching and practice, with many doing both?

The problem is that business schools would struggle to find teachers. Successful doctors and engineers are, barring some terrible accident, successful for life. Few managers are successful for long enough to be credible teachers. Even the best of them, such as Jack Welch, eventually see their reputations tarnished.

Management is not, in any case, a profession. First, there is no formal qualification for admission to its ranks. While most people would object to being operated on by a surgeon without a medical degree or living in a building designed by someone with no architectural training, few regard an MBA as a prerequisite for being a manager (although some believe it should be a disqualification).

The second reason management belongs with the liberal arts is that, like them, it inhabits the realm of speculation rather than science. Medicine relies on a body of knowledge established by successive generations and adjusted, altered and added to through experience and experiment. The same applies to the building of bridges and buildings, although with more room for flair.

Sociology, psychology and the misnamed field of political science do not generate what Karl Popper called falsifiable hypotheses, or not with any rigour. Neither does management - or rather its hypotheses, such as "companies are better off if they sack their middle managers" or "internet companies will supplant everything that existed before", are falsified so quickly that we are never quite sure what is left.

It is difficult to know whether business schools provide companies with what they want because few companies have the foggiest idea what that is. What is certain is that business schools provide students with what they want: highly paid jobs. The past year has not been a good one for business school graduates but most years have been excellent. The FT's data show that, three years after graduation, students from the top schools are earning three times what they earned when they started their courses. If that is failure, graduate students in English, history or sociology could do with a bit of it.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

LOAD-DATE: September 17, 2002