The Business School Paradox

Jessica Grose recently made a compelling argument in The New York Times: Even elite colleges are becoming trade schools. Students increasingly arrive on campus focused on the job at the other end. Majors become career choices. Internships become credentials. Education becomes an investment measured by the salary it produces. Grose is right to worry about this. A university should do more than prepare someone for a first job. It should broaden the mind, develop critical thinking, and expose students to possibilities they didn’t know existed.

But professional schools present an important complication. Medicine, law, engineering, architecture, education, and business aren’t simply academic disciplines. They are theories-of-practice disciplines. They don’t merely study the world. They prepare people to act in it. And much of what they know comes not only from theory, but from practice itself.

WHERE PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE COMES FROM

We tend to imagine knowledge moving in one direction: Researchers discover something, Teachers explain it, Practitioners apply it. Professional knowledge rarely develops so neatly. Often someone tries something in the world, something unexpected happens, and a new practice emerges. Researchers investigate it, test it, and develop concepts that explain why it works. Practitioners try those ideas in new circumstances, discover their limits, and generate new questions. Practice isn’t downstream from research; it helps generate it.

That’s where I would qualify Grose’s argument. The answer to excessive vocationalism isn’t to move professional education farther from practice. It is to create a richer conversation between theory and experience. And that has consequences for who teaches.

KNOWING THE PLAYBOOK ISN’T ENOUGH

A CEO once described some very smart academics to me this way: “These are the guys from your high school football team who knew every play in the book but spent the whole game on the bench.” A little harsh, perhaps, but the distinction matters.

Understanding organizational change is different from confronting a powerful executive who opposes it. Studying entrepreneurship is different from staring at a bank balance and wondering whether you can make payroll. Knowing strategy is different from making a consequential decision with incomplete information. These experiences produce knowledge of their own.

But the football analogy works in reverse, too: Playing the game doesn’t make you a coach. Twenty years running a company doesn’t automatically qualify someone to teach management. Experience without reflection can become little more than war stories.

Professional schools need both. They need faculty with enough academic grounding to understand the scholarship, enough pedagogical ability to turn ideas into learning, and enough consequential experience to know what those ideas look like when they collide with reality. Experience without reflection becomes anecdote. Theory without sufficient contact with practice risks becoming abstraction.

ENTER THE ‘PRACADEMIC’

There is a name for people who deliberately inhabit these worlds: pracademics. I happen to be one. I’ve spent 37 years as a clinical professor in a business school while working outside the university with companies, government agencies, the military, and organizations around the world.

A good pracademic isn’t simply a practitioner who has been given a classroom, nor is it an academic who occasionally consults. The useful ones have dual credibility. They understand the intellectual standards of the university and the professional standards of the field. They carry research into practice and, just as importantly, bring problems, emerging practices, and inconvenient facts back into the university.

Neither world can see everything from where it stands. I learned that years ago from the late Karl Weick, one of the great organizational theorists of his generation. Karl would sometimes stop me in the hall and ask what I was working on. I’d tell him about some organization trying something unusual. Karl would listen. Then he’d start asking questions. Sometimes he came along.

2 WAYS OF KNOWING

I particularly remember a trip Karl and I made to an FBI crime lab when DNA forensics was still a nascent field. We walked through the same facility, talked to the same people, and watched the same emerging practices. But we saw different things. Karl saw patterns and questions that could become theory. I saw practices and capabilities that could change how organizations worked. On the trip home, we compared notes and challenged what the other thought he had seen. Questions emerged that neither of us would have generated alone.

That experience taught me something fundamental about professional education: Neither of us possessed the whole picture. Karl’s theoretical perspective revealed patterns I couldn’t see. My experience in organizations helped me recognize practical possibilities and obstacles that weren’t as visible from his vantage point. The insight happened between us.

This is why the debate over academic versus vocational education can be misleading. Grose is right that universities impoverish themselves when education becomes narrowly transactional. But professional schools occupy more complicated territory because their knowledge comes from more than one place.

Medicine makes this obvious. No one would suggest that studying physiology, pathology, and pharmacology is sufficient preparation for treating patients. Medical education combines scientific knowledge with supervised practice because clinical judgment develops through encounters with actual patients. Business is different in degree, but not in principle. You cannot learn everything about doing by learning about doing.

WHEN THE TRIBES SEPARATE

Yet business schools have gradually separated the activities professional education needs to connect. Researchers create and test knowledge. Teachers develop students. Practitioners create knowledge through action and experience.

Each has its own standards of excellence: Researchers have journals and citations; Teachers have pedagogy and student outcomes; Practitioners have organizational results and professional impact. The problem isn’t specialization, it’s separation.

We become sophisticated judges of the worlds we inhabit and surprisingly poor judges of worlds we don’t. A distinguished researcher may have little basis for judging the significance of transforming a company or developing a military capability. An accomplished executive may be equally incapable of recognizing important scholarship. We don’t know how to read one another’s scoreboards.

Professional schools need all three forms of expertise. More importantly, they need enough people moving among them to keep knowledge circulating. That is the real function of the pracademic.

AI MAKES EXPERIENCE MORE VALUABLE

Grose worries that higher education is becoming excessively focused on preparing students for jobs. AI gives us another reason to share that concern. Preparing students narrowly for today’s jobs may be one of the least future-proof things a professional school can do.

AI can already explain theories, summarize cases, analyze data, compare frameworks, and generate strategic alternatives. That doesn’t make knowledge irrelevant; it changes what is scarce. Judgment is scarce. Experience is scarce. Knowing which problem matters is scarce. Recognizing when the textbook answer doesn’t fit is scarce. Acting when the evidence is incomplete and the consequences are real is scarce. Much of this knowledge is tacit. It develops through experience, reflection, feedback, failure, and another attempt.

So I would make a distinction that extends Grose’s argument: We shouldn’t prepare students merely for jobs. We should prepare them for practice. Job training prepares someone to perform today’s tasks. Professional education should develop the judgment to act when the tasks, technologies, and circumstances change.

And they will change. AI will transform jobs we currently consider secure. Technologies will emerge faster than curricula can be revised. Students graduating today will confront problems during their careers that don’t yet have names. Teaching them today’s playbook isn’t enough. They need to know what to do when the playbook stops working.

That requires research and practice to remain in conversation. Researchers can help students see patterns beyond their own experience. Practitioners can expose them to situations where established explanations break down. Great teachers can help students move between the two. The goal isn’t simply knowing more; it’s developing the judgment to know what to do with what you know.

And that brings us back to the paradox at the heart of Grose’s argument. The answer to an excessively career-oriented university cannot be a professional school increasingly removed from professional practice. Nor should business school become corporate training. Professional schools must be intellectual enough to rise above practice and experienced enough to understand it from the inside. Their faculty should reflect both.

WHAT PROFESSIONAL SCHOOLS SHOULD DO

If professional knowledge develops through the exchange between theory and practice, professional schools should be designed around that exchange.

Start with the faculty. Professional schools should ask two questions about the people teaching students: Do they understand the best thinking about what they teach? And do they know what it is like to actually do it?

The balance will differ by subject and faculty member. A finance researcher and an entrepreneurship professor need not have identical careers, nor should every practitioner be expected to publish scholarly research. But across a professional school, students should regularly encounter faculty who possess both academic credibility and consequential professional experience.

And that experience needs to remain current. Twenty years of impressive experience doesn’t provide twenty more years of professional relevance. Markets change, technologies change, organizations change, and research changes. The pracademic has obligations in both directions: Stay in the game, and keep studying the playbook.

EXPERIENCE IS NOT THE ENEMY OF RIGOR

This is where I think Grose’s argument becomes especially important. She is right that education should transcend the immediate requirements of employment. But in professional schools, we shouldn’t confuse distance from practice with intellectual seriousness.

Experience is not the enemy of rigor. Experience gives us phenomena worth explaining. A new business model appears before we have a theory for it. An entrepreneur invents a new way of organizing work. A leader improvises through a crisis.

Practice produces the anomaly. Research asks why. Theory helps determine whether what happened was an isolated event or something more general. Then practice tests that understanding under different conditions.

Remove rigorous scholarship and experience can deteriorate into folklore (“Here’s what worked for me”). Remove consequential experience and theory can become increasingly elegant while drifting away from the situations it is supposed to illuminate. Remove good teaching and neither becomes education. So the question isn’t whether business schools should become more academic or more practical. They need to become better at connecting the two.

MORE THAN THE FIRST JOB

There is another reason Grose is right to worry about excessive vocationalism. Students don’t need us merely to prepare them for their first jobs; they need us to prepare them for their fifth, and perhaps for a profession that doesn’t exist yet.

AI will make specific skills obsolete faster. What lasts longer is the ability to recognize a new situation, ask better questions, draw on relevant knowledge, learn from experience, and exercise judgment when there is no obvious answer.

That is the difference between job training and professional education. Job training prepares someone to perform an existing task. A great professional school prepares someone to think and act when the task itself changes. That requires intellectual depth. It also requires contact with reality.

THE BUSINESS SCHOOL PARADOX

Jessica Grose is right. Universities should aspire to something larger than preparing students for employment. Education shouldn’t become a transaction in which students accumulate credentials in exchange for anticipated earnings.

But professional schools carry an additional obligation: They prepare people to practice. And practice involves acting when information is incomplete, circumstances are changing, people have competing interests, and the consequences are real. Those situations don’t merely require knowledge, they produce it.

That is the complication professional schools add to Grose’s argument. Theories of practice don’t emerge from theory alone; they emerge from the continuing encounter between theory and experience. Our faculty should reflect that reality. We need great researchers who can see what practitioners cannot. We need experienced practitioners who can see what researchers cannot. And we need people capable of moving between those worlds and turning what they discover into learning.

Call them clinical faculty. Professors of practice. Practitioner-scholars. I still like pracademics.

Whatever we call them, the principle matters more than the title. Knowing the playbook isn’t enough; playing the game isn’t enough either. The best professional faculty understand both and know how to teach students when to trust each one.

So yes, business schools should be more than trade schools. But they should never become schools about business rather than schools of business.

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Jeff DeGraff is a Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He is the author, with his wife Staney DeGraff, of The Art of Change: Transforming Paradoxes Into Breakthroughs.

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