Free Republic

MBA students at top business schools are borrowing more money than ever to pay for their degrees. The average debt carried on the back of graduating MBAs at Wharton increased by nearly $5,000 last year to a record $109,836, the highest debt burden reported by any business school. Wharton MBAs now graduate with debt that is more than a third higher than their counterparts at Harvard Business School and Stanford's Graduate School of Business. The largest year-over-year increase in student debt was at Dartmouth's Tuck School, where the average debt burden of a class of 2010 MBA rose by more...

If Josh Kaufman had gone to business school, he probably would have graduated this year with an MBA from Harvard or Stanford. But Kaufman, a 28-year-old entrepreneur and former assistant brand manager for Procter & Gamble, thinks business school is pretty much a waste of time and money. MBA programs, he says firmly, have become so expensive that students "must effectively mortgage their lives" and take on "a crippling burden of debt" to get what is "mostly a worthless piece of paper." Kaufman believes that MBA programs "teach many worthless, outdated, even outright damaging concepts and practices." And if that's...

Businesses are looking to revolutionise state education by bidding to run hundreds of schools, as politicians open the door to new education providers. Companies want to create national chains of state schools, eclipsing the current groups of charitable academy sponsors, which tend to be small and geographically based. Although both the Government and the Conservatives say that organisations driven by profit should not run schools, both have created a path for them to enter the sector. Governing bodies of new, or existing, schools can appoint a contractor to operate the school on their behalf — a model used widely in...

To call 2009 an interesting year for management education is perhaps an understatement bordering on the extreme. With the global financial crisis taking its toll on everything from the MBA job market and endowments to financial aid and the reputation of the MBA degree itself, 2009 promises to go down in history as a year to forget. For students and graduates of MBA programs, 2009 was the year that jobs and internship offers became harder to find, even at the top schools; a year when the scarcity of student loans and visas for international students threatened to derail even the...

They still call them presidents. DeVry University recently changed head honchos. The old president, John Skubiak, 56, stepped down and a new president, David Pauline, 49, was appointed to succeed him. Honcho, by the way, is a Japanese word. Each neighborhood is divided into small sub-units or groups of residents. On a rotating basis, people are appointed to collect community funds, organize community events, and such. These people are called the honcho. DeVry presidents do much more than preside over small community events, to be sure. But, they are not called CEOs-- even at fopros. DeVry is one of the...

Critics of free enterprise have set their sights on business schools, blaming them for recent corporate scandals. If only people like home goods retailer Martha Stewart and Enron's Jeffrey Skilling were taught business ethics during graduate school, they might not have committed their alleged crimes, or so the argument goes. The implication is that business schools are aiding and abetting accounting fraud and other misdeeds by failing to teach their students not to commit crimes.The criticism of business schools plays into a common perception of capitalism as a lawless, under-regulated activity. Some business school representatives have even jumped on the...