The Important and the Unimportant in Business Education

Abstract

Importance can only be measured by one's own values; hence, this prescription is personal. Business schools should aim to produce not just efficient, but also decent human beings whose business life is guided not just by a concern with legal compliance but with criteria of fairness, which they have worked out themselves and which their conscience makes them want to stick to. Courses in business ethics can be designed to mesh with and evaluate the rest of the curriculum. The ideal graduate should also be someone who not only operates efficiently in the economic and social structure in which he or she works but also has reasoned views about how those structures should be improved. If it is too much to expect business schools to train people for the public sector or non-profits, at least it should produce people with a sense of their responsibilities as elite citizens, who are the public sector's owners. Courses in political economy, for example, comparative capitalisms, are one way of doing that.