How Business Schools Can Justify Their Worth

Ronan Gruenbaum, Global Director of Undergraduate Learning & Development at Hult International Business School

There are two Ds that most students take with them after graduation: a Degree and plenty of Debt. Not everyone makes it that far; some live in countries where a Bachelor's education is free, achieve full scholarships, have wealthy parents or are independently wealthy.

But they are the exception, not the rule.

Looking just at the UK and the USA, the average debt from a Bachelor program in the US is over $24,000, over £45,000 in the UK and for MBA programs, up to $150,000 in the US, while taking into account the tuition fees and living costs.

In addition to this, one must consider the number of large, multinational organizations that have said they no longer insist on degrees for professional roles. These companies include Google, IBM, Apple, Hilton, Bank of America, Penguin Random House, Ernst & Young, Meta, McKinsey, Accenture, Kellogg, Nordstrom, Whole Foods, Starbucks and Walmart, to name just a few. As Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute (now Lightcast) said, "Just because you remove a degree requirement, it doesn’t guarantee a hiring manager will not prefer someone with a degree, but clearly there are potential students, and their parents, already wondering if going into so much debt and spending so much time getting a degree that might not help them get a job is worth."

This majorly affects liberal arts degrees, unfortunately, more than the 'practical' disciplines of business, engineering, law and medicine, with courses being forced to close due to insufficient student numbers.

So, business schools and universities should all be asking themselves, at a time of increased competition of an estimated 18,000 business schools and universities worldwide, what is their purpose and how can they attract students?

But that's not the least of it.

All the above has been brewing for decades and while some smaller schools have folded or been absorbed by larger institutions, there is now a far worse threat to their existence, which few are aware of and take seriously.

“There are interesting experiments in many institutions on how to incorporate AI in the classroom and the learning process, with many aware that we have to teach students how to use the tools, not ban them from using them.”

When AI burst into everyone's consciousness with the public launch of ChatGPT-3 in November 2022, the world sat up and took notice. No longer were the developments of organizations like DeepMind (and their 2017 AlphaGo, which beat the world master of 'Go') the preserve of geeks and futurists. Higher education, however, has allowed itself to focus mostly on how AI is impacting current operations, how to avoid students cheating when they have Generative AI at their fingertips to produce high-quality reports, essays, summaries and analyses in a matter of minutes (though generating the prompts that create such reports does take its time). There are interesting experiments in many institutions on how to incorporate AI in the classroom and the learning process, with many aware that we have to teach students how to use the tools, not ban them from using them. Many faculty and learning instructors have started to create virtual personalized Socratic tutors (such as through Cognitti and Tutello) that would allow students to have self-guided learning, use AI for grading, provide qualitative personalized feedback to each student and a myriad of other labor-saving tasks to simplify their workloads and improve the student experience.

All these experiments and activities are to be lauded and increased.

But this misses one fundamental point. Students do not study for their Bachelor's or Master's degrees on the whole because they want a greater depth of knowledge and critical analysis on their subject matter to have more interesting discussions with friends over a drink. They study because they hope this will help them get a better job (and they may define 'better' in many different ways).

The challenge we face is that within a few short years, AI will be used to such an extent that it will be able to do many jobs, from manual repetitive tasks with the use of dextrous self-learning robots to content creation, analysis, creative solutions, high-level 'thinking', strategic planning and many other professional roles that currently require degrees. If AI can do those jobs, how will newly graduated students differentiate themselves from AI? AI will be faster, more accurate, more reliable and, in the near future, will hallucinate less and be able to self-diagnose issues more cheaply.

What is it that humans can bring to the organization that AI cannot and how can universities teach this?

Technologist, futurist and adjunct professor at Hult International Business School,Stephen Alexander, notes how we need to identify and focus on developing the 'human virtues' that differentiate us from AI. The emphasis should be on virtues such as intuition, empathy, emotional intelligence and creativity. AI will, of course, manage to make a good attempt at mimicking them; using data of typical human responses it can find in its data set to produce something that looks like intuition or empathy, but the humans on the other end will know it's not real.

Parents wanting to send their offspring to university will ask these questions before long; what is it that you are doing that will help your child get a job in a world run by robots and AI? This is where most universities and business schools will have a wake-up call, as most are still focused on delivering 'knowledge' that students must retain long enough to pass an exam, instead of teaching them how to develop their 'human virtues'.

At Hult, our Bachelor of Business Administration program teaches and assesses students over the four years of their studies on Critical and Creative Thinking, Communication and Collaboration skills and Learning to Learn, with these five broad categories broken down into a total of 16 sub-categories and 39 practices. Equally, we teach and assess our students on the five Mindsets: Growth, Global, Entrepreneurial, Ethical and Self-Awareness (also broken down, this time into 12 sub-categories and 22 practices).

Ironically, it might be a development with AI that will allow us to coach students in empathy to scale, having photo-realistic AI avatars take the roles of colleagues, employees, customers (or other roles), with purposefully designed situations that will allow students to practice repeatedly how to build and effectively show their empathy, as well as other virtues.

If nothing else, we should all empathize with the problems our students will be facing in the not-too-distant future.