About five years ago, Warren Bennis and James O’Toole penned an article for the Harvard Business Review called “How Business Schools Lost Their Way.” It was, in many ways, the shot heard round the world. (I was visiting b-schools in China when it came out and people were talking about it there. The same day.) Their premise: that way too much of what passes for research in business schools is an unmitigated waste–abstract financial and economic analysis, increasingly focused on theory instead of practice, that’s completely irrelevant to the real world of business.
A new study calls that conclusion into question. It was co-authored by Jonathan P. O’Brien of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Paul L. Drnevich and Craig E. Armstrong of the University of Alabama, and T. Russell Crook of the University of Tennessee and published in the December-February issue of Academy of Management Learning and Education.
The authors found that scholarly research at business schools appears to add as much as 21 percent to the MBA students’ future salaries, or about $24,000 a year. “The result strongly suggests that research-intensive schools generally do a superior job in helping their students acquire and hone their knowledge, skills, and abilities, which pays financial returns to the students through their future employment,” the authors write. “One might conclude that the actual state of the relevance of business school research is not nearly as dire as…some have suggested.”
Read the full article: For MBAs, Faculty Research Pays Off