Employers Say MBAs Delusional About Abilities

UT at Dallas' School of Management is ranked 78th among the top business schools in the U.S. by Poets&Quants.

University of Texas at Dallas’ Jindal School of Management

SURPRISE: NEITHER STUDENTS NOR RECRUITERS THINK B-SCHOOL PREPARES THEM FOR CAREERS

In the end, his survey attempt to expose the proverbial elephant in the room — the underlying issues that stakeholders sense but either can’t clearly define or fear bringing to the forefront. Admittedly nervous when he released the results, Kavanaugh has received positive responses to his work. He cites an HR hiring manager whom he recently met on a plane, whose light went off when he shared his results with her. He also points to how his students would “fess up” when he would conduct class polls that yielded “unflattering” results.

In fact, Kavanaugh’s own data affirms the unease among all parties. When he asked, “How would you rate the job universities are doing of making business school students career-ready,” just 13.9% of students answered in the net promoter range of 9 or 10. Career center personnel responded nearly identically at 13.3%. Employers? Not surprisingly, just 1.9% of respondents were net promoters for the schools producing career-ready students.

Don’t look at Kavanaugh as an iconoclast arguing that the system is broken, however. Instead, he is searching for where it needs greater attention. “I wasn’t trying to say MBA programs or business school was a waste a money [with the survey],” he asserts. “Far from it. I want people to get more from it. You’re investing lots of time and money. Why not get the most from it?”

SURVEY TITLE AT ODDS WITH SURVEY SAMPLE

That said, the survey comes with some flaws. Notably, Kavanaugh titles his research, “Are MBA Programs Preparing Students for Success?” Just one problem: The survey pool includes undergraduate business majors as well as MBAs. “MBA was more or less the marquee headline,” he admits, “but I extended the question to business schools because I think it is important.”

Indeed, the student sample is an eclectic mix. Aside from full-time MBAs and some undergraduates, it includes executive, and online MBA students, along with students enrolled in business masters programs. The respondents range from students in tier-one programs to smaller state schools. Even more, the data is not broken down into different buckets and respondents could even opt to answer anonymously.

While Kavanaugh argues that focusing exclusively on full-time MBAs would miss key demographics, he concedes that his methodology was a “trifle muddy.” The same would apply to 10,000 recruiters he surveyed, who hailed from both blue chip and niche firms, with the survey sporadically netting two to three decision-makers from the same company. At the same time, Kavanaugh was rather meticulous with career center leadership, hand-picking people he had worked with or held leadership roles (rounding out the rest with respondents who were “employer-facing”).

Kavanaugh grants that he could’ve segmented his data into several surveys. In the end, that would have missed the larger point, he believes. “There are some basic themes coming out that I think are still relevant. I’m not going to pinpoint the top five elite business schools vs. the part time vs. the eLearning. I do think you can infer some things. I’m not trying to demonize any one of them. I have hired people from each of those different categories. There are people who are rock stars from all of them.”

“HUBRIS” AMONG BIGGEST DANGERS FOR MBAs IN THE WORKFORCE

So what can be done to bring employers, students, and schools in closer alignment? Kavanaugh points to the top tier MBA programs, particularly in their efforts to connect their value proposition to employer needs and providing well-rounded, hands-on learning opportunities beyond the internship. Past that, Kavanaugh recommends a greater attention to design thinking in addition to problem-solving.

“[The latter is] taking a problem and figuring it out because it was the right answer; Problem finding is working with mysteries. There is a symptom and there is a diagnosis,” he shares. “[You need to] have Intellectual curiosity, the passion and bias to solve the problem by getting into the details and to show the work in ways that answers the questions that people might have about it.”

For Kavanaugh, this is the ability that differentiates everyday knowledge workers from leaders. “You see people who are otherwise very intelligent, high GPA and good problem solvers hit a mental wall. It’s not a pretty sight because they don’t know how to step back, figure out what they know, do some estimation, apply a framework, and adapt to uncertainty….What also distinguishes [people] is the ability to decide and find problems and structure them before they decide to solve them. To me, that’s the essence of being successful.”

When it comes to doling out advice to MBA graduates, Kavanaugh offers a time-tested nugget that harkens back to the days of Greek tragedy: Don’t get too full of yourself.  “Hubris can creep into your own self-image because you may have been in that cycle in school. It is the ability to know what we don’t know and understand that you’re stepping into a different world when you start a job that would really allow learning. You’re stepping out to a different environment in a job, especially where they have a different set of metrics than your school, grades or internship. People could care less about that MBA when you’re out in the workforce. It’s more about what you can contribute.”

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