Paying the price of dumbing down business education

Murray Hunter


Paying the price of dumbing down business education

The lucrative boom in university business courses has led to graduates unable to think critically, who didn’t learn how to learn.

JUL 09, 2024





In economic theory, education is considered a social investment to enhance the quality of the future workforce. In development economics, the types and quality of higher education would have a major influence upon the type of foreign direct investment a country would muster.

A high level and quality of higher education qualifications in sunrise technology disciplines would assist in ensuring economic growth and increasing levels of productivity. This would presumably ensure a country escapes falling into the dreaded “middle income trap”.

For the individual, possession of any degree has some amount of prestige associated with it. Employers would traditionally seek out potential employees with degrees. Degree holders would traditionally be paid a premium salary over those who don’t possess any form of degree.

The labour market became so competitive in the 1990s, when a single degree wasn’t enough. Elite positions inside companies were reserved for candidates who had double or post graduate degrees.

For families, higher education was seen as a great investment, and universities set up business schools to take advantage of this. Fees for business degrees were usually offered at a premium compared to most other types of degrees.

These business schools became massive profit centres within universities. They had a financial bonanza when higher education was opened up to foreign students. Lucrative courses like the bachelor of business, economics, and MBA curriculums had to be modified to suit new foreign cohorts with English as a second language.

Downward spiral of business education

The massive growth of business schools had consequences. Entry requirements have been set relatively low by many universities to “get bums on seats”, while the curriculum was simplified to accommodate foreign students, whose level of English comprehension is far below that of local cohorts.

Academic staff quality has also decreased with the demand for more business lecturers. Very few lecturers actually have any business background, so are unable to speak from their own experiences.

PhD studies undertaken by tenured staff often have little relevance to general business studies. Their qualifications are often on topics unrelated to undergraduate and even post-graduate education. Business generalists rather than specialists give business schools the best academic staff utility.

The learning ethics of the current generation of students is vastly different to previous generations, who tended to study for the sake of gaining knowledge. There was a genuine learning culture.

The current generation requires much more spoon feeding, as attention spans are generally much lower than in previous decades. Students today multi-task with their mobile devices, taking attention in the classroom away.

Most subject curriculums are now generated from available textbooks and research tools such as Google search to undertake assignments.

Sometimes the curriculums of top business schools focusing on post-industrial economies are adopted wholesale by copy and paste into the curriculums of subjects in business schools in developing countries, like Malaysia is today.

The result is a mismatch of material to students who will work in business environments different from the developed world.

Never has plagiarism been so rampant in universities, both in teaching and learning. Whole courses are plagiarised without any concern by university authorities.

At the student level, students are very different from those a generation ago, who were expected to research their subjects thoroughly in libraries. Today, assignments can be written using AI tools, with little original work presented by students for assessment.

The curriculum today has been burdened with a host of compulsory subjects to meet ministry of education requirements.

Students at undergraduate level must undertake 4 or 5 Mata Pelajaran Pengajian Umun courses, which are unrelated directly to the course they are undertaking, wasting up to half a year of time in a degree course. Students in other countries don’t face this handicap.

The curriculum has become regimented with the Objective Based Learning format, which gives no latitude to instructors to add content to the subject that may enrich understanding and provide local contexts to the subject.

These requirements add paperwork to the instructor, adding to administration, and taking away precious teaching time. Thus teaching has been reduced to the lowest common denominator.

In some universities, teaching staff face pressure from their superiors to pass all students. The degree becomes worth little more than a certificate of attendance, rather than a document that certifies a student has met a prescribed level of knowledge and skills.

As a consequence, many graduates today have not learnt the key lesson from the courses they have undertaken, that time in a university really should be about teaching a person how to learn. You go to university to learn how to learn.

Graduates in real life careers need the ability to learn new information and apply this new information to situations and issues they face in their working lives. This is the top skill graduates need to be successful.

The above is a recipe for the lack of critical thinking in society today. The ability to solve problems, have empathy with stakeholders, and apply creativity to produce innovation is low today in society. The ability to understand and have novel points of view and present them in public is weak in the local workforce today.

Employers have little quality to choose from.

According to the Centre for Future Labour Market Studies, a research centre in Malaysia, approximately 90,000 graduates face unemployment upon graduation.

There are more students graduating in business and social sciences than jobs available, leading to graduate unemployment for periods up to six months or more. Many students are forced to take jobs outside their qualification areas, stay at home, or start up some sort of micro-business.

Unemployment of university graduates is at a crisis point in Malaysia: universities are producing graduates more than there are positions in the private sector.

If some of these graduates find their way into the civil service, then there should be more courses available on public administration rather than business.

In addition, the scope of TVET should be widened to accommodate more students into the trades. TVET could also become an education path to correct the gender imbalance where more women than men are university graduates.

In addition, as artificial intelligence eats into the corporate job market over the next couple of years, TVET will have to play a major role in helping the youth of Malaysia find rewarding work.

Universities are producing both graduates and postgraduates who lack the knowledge, skills, and aptitude to take on industry jobs in the coming decade. Tertiary education must be reinvented to avert future job market issues, and reverse the dumbing-down of education.

Originally published in FMT 8th July 2024