Does Management Education Add Value?

Thanks to television shows, films, and books, the education of doctors and lawyers has become the stuff of legend. Typically, true professionals undergo an intense three- to four-year postgraduate program. On graduating, they then have to obtain a formal license to practice by passing a comprehensive state or federal exam designed to test their mastery of the body of knowledge their educational degree ostensibly conferred. Once they pass this test, they have to invest in a certain amount of clinical training and continuing education to stay abreast of evolving knowledge. In some fields, licensed professionals must periodically pass further exams in order to recertify their licenses.

Managers don’t face such challenges. Although the MBA has been the fastest-growing graduate degree over the past 20 years, it is not a requirement for becoming a manager. Managers do not have to sit a formal exam to demonstrate their knowledge even at the end of an MBA, let alone stay current in their field. There is no obligation for them to know anything about investing in innovative new financial derivates or special purpose vehicles, for example, even if they serve on boards required to approve such potentially risky transactions. To the contrary, data on enrollment in executive education programs offered by business schools suggest that people who already possess an MBA are less likely than those who don’t to invest in lifelong learning in the form of continuing education.

Management today could easily adopt the more stringent knowledge and competency standards required by the true professions. The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) already sets modest accreditation requirements for business school programs, and the Graduate Management Admission Council administers the GMAT exam in an effort to gauge a potential MBA student’s intellectual ability. The council also examines and accredits the MBA curricula of most schools granting this degree. The AACSB or another similar body could devise and administer an exam that all graduating MBAs would have to pass before they were licensed to practice. Imagine a Certified Business Professional (CBP) status granted for fulfilling this additional requirement beyond the MBA. The same governing body could also devise the standards for continuing education courses that managers would need to take to maintain the CBP license over time. Professionalizing management in this way would have the additional benefit of making it easier for firms and employees to invest in continuing education and development. The costs would no longer be borne by just a few employers who provide such training, only to have their employees move on to other companies.

The bigger challenge is gaining acceptance of the idea that educational standards will improve the practice of management. Many management scholars and practitioners believe that management is as much art or craft as science, better mastered through experience than through formal education. The softer skills of management (interpersonal effectiveness, communication, leadership) are hard to learn through formal education and harder yet to test for in a standardized exam. Some people, notably Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, go so far as to argue that experience is the only valid teacher. In other words, those who possess a management education are no more effective than those who don’t. Even if few people go quite that far, many agree with Nobel Prize–winning economist A. Michael Spence, who says that higher education is simply a signaling device: Going to a business school allows individuals to credibly signal their greater commitment to a career in management (admittedly useful information for employers). And many MBA students have yet a different perspective: They believe that business school is simply an opportunity to develop a robust network of peers and alumni.

In the absence of empirical evidence, the idea that people can improve the practice of management by mastering some body of knowledge rests on faith. If you believe that the only value in management education is derived from signaling dedication to the field or building networks, it makes no sense to advocate the professionalization of management. It also calls into question the legitimacy of all current university-based management education, which does entail studying a broadly similar curriculum across all schools offering management degrees.

But if you believe, as we do, that the practice of management can benefit from judgment that draws upon a coherent body of formal knowledge, then pushing management in the direction of the true professions makes a lot of sense. That’s not to ignore or underestimate the importance of experience or skills that can’t be easily taught such as exercising good judgment and becoming a more effective manager. Indeed, experience and soft skills are highly valued in professions such as medicine and law. A belief in the value of professionalizing management does not require us to endorse the current management curricula and methods of teaching. A healthy profession will always challenge its existing paradigm and be open to changing it. For instance, the accepted bodies of knowledge and teaching methods in medicine have continuously evolved and at times have changed dramatically.