The Business School World Responds To Chris Marquis – And Not All Of It Is Pushback

Chris Marquis’ New York Times essay calling for business schools to be shut down has become one of the most talked-about pieces on business education in years, and the debate it started is still growing.

In I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down, published Sunday (October 18), the Cambridge Judge Business School professor argues that business schools can’t be fixed by adding an ethics course or a sustainability center. Drawing on more than 20 years of teaching at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge, he contends that the MBA steers idealistic students toward consulting and finance, that the case method narrows their thinking to the perspective of a single executive, and that the “win-win” promise of stakeholder capitalism rests on weak evidence. As alternatives, he points to Stuart Hart’s clean-sheet sustainability MBA at the University of Vermont and to management scholar Martin Parker’s idea of “schools for organizing.”

In an interview with Poets&Quants on Monday (October 19), Marquis said the call for abolition shouldn’t be read literally. “I work at a business school,” he said. “I think there are so many good people at business schools that want to make change.” What he wants, rather, is reinvention: a curriculum built around the long-term crises business leaders will face, and faculty incentives that reward real-world impact, much like the Research Excellence Framework he has come to admire in Britain. He also said he had received hundreds of messages, the vast majority of them supportive. (See Exclusive: The Professor Who Called To Abolish Business Schools Tells P&Q What He’d Build Instead.)

Now the responses are coming in from across business education, and not everyone agrees. Why has the piece resonated so strongly? As business schools from the M7 to the top publics report significantly declining apps in the last cycle – and as rumblings grow louder of a continued alarming decline in the first round of applications for the Class of 2029 – a certain measure of existential dread is in the air.

NICOLAI FOSS: ‘COMPARED WITH WHAT?’

Copenhagen’s Nicolai Foss: problems cited by Marquis call for research, not abolition

Nicolai Foss, professor of strategy at Copenhagen Business School, delivers one of the most rigorous critiques so far. In a Substack post titled Abolish the Business School? Not So Fast, published Monday (October 19), Foss acknowledges real problems, including perverse incentives from rankings, corporate influence and management fads. His objection is methodological: Marquis moves from problems with particular practices to claims about the essential nature of business schools, without comparing them to realistic alternatives.

Compared with what? Sociology departments have their own orthodoxies, Foss notes, public policy schools depend on donors and governments, and mission-driven organizations can engage in “mission washing” just as companies greenwash.

“Marquis repeatedly identifies phenomena that organizational economists would recognize as problems of governance, incentives, selection, measurement, and institutional design, and then treats their existence as reasons to abandon the organization,” Foss writes. “It is rather like discovering an agency problem and concluding that the firm should be abolished.”

He also sees a contradiction in Marquis’ alternative: a manager asked to balance climate, inequality, community welfare and democratic legitimacy is an even bigger protagonist than the executive in a case. “The heroic manager has not disappeared: Marquis has promoted him to social planner,” Foss writes. The problems Marquis identifies, he concludes, call for a research program, not an abolition program.

“Most ironically, your critique of simplified business-school cases is itself a simplified case: one protagonist, one underlying logic, little organizational heterogeneity, and a predetermined conclusion,” Foss writes in a comment on Marquis’ LinkedIn post.

SCOTT BEAULIER: ‘I’D PREFER TO KEEP MINE’

Scott Beaulier, dean of the University of Wyoming College of Business, takes a sharper line. In a Substack post titled Please Don’t Abolish My Business School, published Monday (October 19), Beaulier, an economist with 11 years as a business school dean, finds Marquis’ claim that business schools serve only a private good baffling. Citing Adam Smith’s baker, he argues that the pursuit of profit has produced countless goods that benefit everyone, not just owners. Cooperatives still need cash flow, he adds, and nonprofits still have to make payroll.

His biggest objection is whose experience the essay reflects. Marquis has spent his career teaching some of the world’s most privileged students at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge. Beaulier asks whether he is describing business education in general or only the elite schools where he has worked. In Laramie, Beaulier writes, many students are seeking opportunities their parents never had, some planning to return home to run the family ranch.

His closing line: “Christopher Marquis is welcome to abolish his business school. I’d prefer to keep mine.”

ADAM MARKUS: WHERE’S THE DATA?

Admissions consultant Adam Markus, who advises MBA applicants worldwide, argues that the essay rests on no data at all. In a blog post published Tuesday (October 20), Markus says Marquis offers no survey or systematic evidence that business schools turn idealistic students into careerists. And since Marquis focuses on sustainability and social entrepreneurship, he adds, the students he talks with most are likely the ones already interested in those careers.

Markus tests the essay against Marquis’ own school. According to Cambridge Judge’s latest MBA employment report, covering the class of 2024-25, 55% of graduates went into industry, including technology, health care and energy, while 23% entered finance and 19% consulting. The leading recruiters Judge lists are Google, Model ML, PwC and TikTok, not McKinsey and Goldman Sachs. A career in finance or consulting, he adds, doesn’t mean a graduate has abandoned the goal of doing good; banking is a common path into impact investing.

“Marquis will have observed students becoming preoccupied with prestige and compensation and given the current MBA job market, many will be particularly concerned about just getting a job,” Markus writes. “Observations of this kind cannot establish that business schools systematically transform altruistic students into narrowly self-interested professionals. Such a claim would require evidence of students’ motivations before enrollment, how those motivations evolved and what caused the changes. That is to say, scholarship.”

Without that evidence, he writes, “this is just bullshit written on the authority of someone’s prestigious job title.” And he suggests that Marquis, who studies social entrepreneurship, become a social entrepreneur himself and build the alternative he wants.

BRAYDEN KING: BE CLEARER ABOUT OUR PURPOSE

Kellogg’s Brayden King: One of B-schools’ strengths is “students learn how to think about, evaluate, and make business decisions based on different disciplinary frameworks”

Brayden King, a sociologist and the Max McGraw Chair of Management and the Environment at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, shares many of Marquis’ values but rejects his conclusion. In a Substack post titled What Are Business Schools For?, published Monday (October 19), King argues that the weaknesses Marquis presents as inherent to business schools are more varied and complicated than the essay allows. Op-eds, he notes, boil arguments down to a punchy takeaway and sacrifice key details, much as the case studies Marquis criticizes do.

King says he was taught that a good case discussion isn’t meant to reach a simple answer but to apply a framework to a situation where the right choice is unclear, so that students end up divided over plausible options, none of which works out well for everyone. And business schools bring many disciplines to that discussion.

“Business schools, like the other professional schools, aren’t unified disciplinary environments,” King writes. “They are homes to economists, sociologists, management scholars, psychologists, operations researchers, accountants, and varied other disciplines. Each one brings a slightly different point of view and emphasis. I think that’s one of the great strengths of a business school. Students learn how to think about, evaluate, and make business decisions based on different disciplinary frameworks.”

Cases also make up less of the curriculum than the essay suggests, King writes. His 10-week leadership course uses two, including one he co-wrote about an Italian energy company’s effort to build a green culture. The rest relies on readings, role plays, simulations and weekly interactive exercises – a hands-on approach he expects to grow as AI changes teaching. He also points to his recently retired Kellogg colleague David Besanko, whose Public Economics for Business Leaders course dug into the consequences of business decisions for communities, governments and industries, and became one of the school’s most popular classes.

King is skeptical that schools for organizing would do better. Schools of public policy, public administration and sustainability already exist, he notes, yet business remains one of the most popular undergraduate majors, because students paying high tuition want a career payoff. Any alternative would face the same pressures and end up with many of the same problems. And business schools do more than teach, he adds, convening leaders to debate pressing issues – including through the ESG leadership program Marquis himself leads at Cambridge.

Still, King credits Marquis with raising the right question.

“Maybe we haven’t been clear enough about our purpose,” he writes.

PHILIP KOTLER: KEEP BUSINESS SCHOOLS – AND ADD A NEW DEGREE

Philip Kotler, distinguished professor emeritus of marketing at Northwestern’s Kellogg School, thanks Marquis for “his challenging call to abolish business schools” in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday (October 20), titled The Need For Improved Business Schools, then rejects it. “I strongly favor keeping business schools and expanding their content, coverage and impact,” he writes.

His answer is a new degree: a Master of Organization Development, or MOD, to train leaders for unions, nonprofits and government agencies. Rather than separate schools, Kotler suggests that “progressive business schools might offer two degrees, either an MBA or a MOD,” so students on both tracks learn from each other.

He also argues the bigger problem is different from the one Marquis identifies.

“The real problem today,” Kotler writes, “is that many students with MBAs cannot find jobs.”

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