A Professor Wants to Abolish Business Schools. My Kellogg Classmates Had Other Ideas.

By Stacy Blackman | Founder, Stacy Blackman Consulting · Kellogg MBA

On October 18, The New York Times ran a guest essay by Christopher Marquis. He teaches at Cambridge and spent a decade at Harvard Business School. He argues that business schools should be abolished.

Within hours, the essay landed in my Kellogg class WhatsApp group. What followed was one of the smartest conversations about the MBA I’ve seen in years. It came from people many years into careers in consulting, operations, energy, HR, and entrepreneurship.

I’ve spent 25 years helping people get into business school, so I’m not neutral. But I don’t think we should wave this critique away. Here’s where I landed, with a lot of help from my classmates (who signed off on being mentioned here).

Where Marquis has a point

His case, in brief:

• The case method trains students to play the person in charge rather than question the system around them.
• Many cases are shaped by the companies they feature.
• The “win-win” story, that companies can serve society and shareholders at the same time, has been oversold.
• Students who arrive wanting to fix health care or climate get swept into the race for consulting and banking internships.

My classmates agreed with more of this than you might expect. One, who spent his career advising companies, said a single ethics course changes nothing and that cases, as written, don’t help much. I see the effect myself. Applicants tell us they want to work in clean energy or health care. By first-year recruiting, the pull of the big firms is strong.

What my classmates would change

Nobody in our group wanted business school shut down. They wanted it to teach something different.

• Judgment over spreadsheets. One classmate described clients debating cost of capital to two decimal places because a model said so. He’s seen “experts” who never walked a factory floor sign off on savings. He’s seen analysts run a hundred correlations in seconds and present the fluke. AI will multiply all of this. His wish list: more decision-making, organizational behavior, a semester working on an actual factory floor, writing, using LLMs well, and (my favorite) mandatory improv.
• The bigger tradeoffs. A classmate who did years of green-energy work said leaders were naive about the cost of decarbonization. He would teach health care systems, population health and safety nets as business tradeoffs, because they are.
• People. Our classmate who went into HR was a rarity in our class. She pointed out that we were required to take finance, accounting, marketing, economics, two statistics courses, and organizational behavior, but no HR. At every reunion, someone tells her they wish they’d taken org behavior more seriously. Most of what they deal with, especially as business owners, is people.
• Apprenticeship. Another suggested two days a week in class and two days shadowing an executive who is a real mentor.

Marquis would likely call this tinkering. He argues that an ethics elective here and a sustainability center there only legitimize the system. But none of these ideas are add-ons. A semester on a factory floor, a required people course, and two days a week alongside a mentor would change what the degree demands and how students spend their time. That’s a different program, and it’s still a business school.

What the essay leaves out

• Career switchers. Marquis suggests universities could build cross-disciplinary pathways into business through sociology, law, and public policy. That may suit some students. But as one classmate put it, to get from an engineering job to business decisions, something is still needed. Maybe not two years, but something.
• The network. A classmate was blunt that the essay never mentions the lifelong friendships with people from all over the world, many of whom now do business together. Nor does it mention the international students who stay and build companies here. Our WhatsApp group, still debating years after graduation, proves it.
• What graduates build. “Kellogg taught me entrepreneurship,” another wrote. Marquis cites research on MBAs running existing companies. He doesn’t count the companies MBAs start.

If you’re applying now

• Look past the rankings to what each school teaches. Look for experiential learning, labs inside real companies, required leadership and people courses, and serious AI integration.
• Write down why you’re going before you arrive. Recruiting season will try to rewrite it.
• Take the “soft” classes seriously.
• Invest in your class. That is the asset that keeps paying off.

The real question isn’t whether business school should exist. It’s whether it teaches judgment, people, and consequences. My classmates are still arguing about it, and that’s the best evidence I have that the good version is worth it.