Does Business Education Still Matter? A London Keynote Says Yes, If Schools Are Willing To Strip Back

Fourteen percent.

That’s the share of Tower Hamlets residents who work in Canary Wharf, despite living next door to one of Europe’s biggest financial districts. Selda Ziya, an edtech consultant based in that part of London who cited the statistic at a London keynote on July 14, used it to make a blunter point than most business school panels get to: talent is everywhere, opportunity isn’t, and B-schools have spent decades organized around the wrong side of that gap.

The keynote’s real subject was whether business education, as currently built, still earns its keep. Its answer was yes, but only for schools willing to stop adding electives and start cutting them.

THE LEGITIMACY PROBLEM

The speakers – Patrick McGurk, Selda Ziya, Urmi Dutta-Roy and Elaine Arden – who came from across the business education sector (academia, industry, and the institutions in between), didn’t dispute that B-schools have a trust problem. Decades of curricula built around shareholder value and efficiency get named, fairly or not, as part of the intellectual scaffolding behind today’s inequality and climate strain.

Meanwhile the bar for graduates has moved: half a century ago, a well-paid job was the whole deal. Now students want purpose alongside pay, employers say they’d rather hire for adaptability than technical fluency, and society expects MBA graduates to show up as problem-solvers on issues schools didn’t used to touch.

WHY THE SEATS ARE STILL FULL

None of that has dented demand. Business and management remain the largest field of study in UK higher education, pulling in roughly 1 in 5 students, and the pattern holds globally. The case for the format hasn’t really changed: every sector still needs people who can allocate resources, lead under ambiguity, and make calls with incomplete information. Elaine called business schools “crucibles,” one of the few places where people from wildly different backgrounds and disciplines are forced into the same room to solve the same problem.

CUT THE SYLLABUS, DON’T JUST EXTEND IT

The sharpest institutional critique of the day was about what schools refuse to stop teaching. Content is commoditized: a lecture on discounted cash flow is available free on YouTube and can be summarized by an AI tool in seconds, so schools that compete on content delivery are competing on a dimension that no longer differentiates them. Patrick argued schools have gotten good at adding courses and bad at retiring them, and Urmi noted that curriculum design needs the same portfolio discipline schools teach their own students to apply to a business: decide what to stop funding, not just what to launch.

The clearest illustration came from Patrick who’d audited Harvard Business School’s Africa-focused catalogue. The cases skewed heavily toward poverty, NGOs, and development narratives, with comparatively few built around African companies simply succeeding. If schools want to claim they’re training global leaders, the argument went, the case library has to reflect global business as it’s actually practiced, which means faculty need time and incentive to build materials in the field rather than defaulting to what’s already in the catalogue.

WHAT DOESN’T COMMODITIZE

Three things, by the panel’s account, still separate a business degree from a YouTube playlist: solid grounding in the fundamentals (accounting, finance, marketing, ops, taught as integrated tools rather than 1960s-era silos), learning agility, and professional judgment. AI was treated less as a threat than as the force clarifying which of those three actually matters most. Routine analysis and first-draft content generation are getting automated; the scarce skill is judging what to do with the output when the decision doesn’t have a clean right answer. “We are operating in the grey,” Urmi noted. “The answer might not be right or wrong.” That kind of judgment doesn’t come from a lecture; it comes from making a call, getting it wrong in front of a team, and doing it again.

Which was the panel’s case against the lecture format itself: several speakers argued the weekly lecture has run out of road, and that leadership specifically can’t be taught from a slide. Their replacement is challenge-led, project-based work with real companies, NGOs, and public institutions: the closest simulation of the ambiguity graduates will actually face. “Getting in the boat,” as Patrick observed, “rather than discussing how to row.”

THE ONE THING AI WON’T TOUCH

The panel’s closing point was less about technology than about what technology can’t substitute for: trust and relationship-building are still built in person. Elaine pushed back directly on the idea that remote work is consequence-free for early-career development: teams build trust through shared experience, not shared Slack channels, and leadership is learned partly by watching how someone else handles a room. AI coaching and simulations can support that development; they don’t replace it.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The keynote’s framing wasn’t decline versus survival; it was reinvention versus irrelevance. Schools that redesign around interdisciplinary, experiential, judgment-building work will matter more, not less, in the next decade. The ones still running fragmented lecture-based curricula built for a different economy will have a harder time explaining why they’re worth the tuition.

The purpose of business education, by this account, was never to hand students the answer. It’s to prepare them to think clearly when there isn’t one.

Benjamin Stevenin is the former Director of Business School Solutions and Partnerships at Times Higher Education. Sally Everett is Professor of Business Education at King’s College London, where she established ILEAD, the centre for innovation, leadership, education and development, in 2023.