Each year, approximately 70 million individuals worldwide complete degrees in business, management, law, or economics, a staggering figure reported by the United Nations-backed Principles for Responsible Management Education (PRME). This statistic encompasses not just traditional business school graduates but represents a vast educational pipeline feeding into institutions that wield immense power: allocating capital, leading organizations, designing global supply chains, and advising governments. The foundational understanding these students gain regarding the purpose and function of the firm will inevitably shape societies for generations to come, making the nature and quality of their education a matter of profound public interest.
This context provides the backdrop for a recent and provocative essay published in The New York Times on October 18, 2026, by Cambridge University’s Chris Marquis. Marquis’s piece ignited a significant debate within academic and business circles by positing that business schools are not merely in need of repair but rather require outright abolition. He characterized these institutions as highly efficient machines, meticulously training leaders whose primary directives are optimization, simplification, and the relentless pursuit of financial deals. In lieu of existing structures, Marquis proposed a radical alternative, drawing inspiration from Martin Parker’s concept of "schools for organizing." In a subsequent interview with Poets&Quants on October 19, 2026, Marquis further elaborated on his vision, clarifying that his ultimate goal was not outright destruction but rather a comprehensive reinvention through the development of new curricula and a reorientation of faculty incentives.
A Deeply Rooted Perspective from Within
The ensuing discussion prompted a thoughtful and detailed response from a veteran academic deeply embedded within the very system Marquis critiques. A professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania for 28 years, currently holding the Deloitte & Touche Professorship and leading Wharton’s Impact, Value, and Sustainable Business Initiative as vice dean, the respondent brings an insider’s perspective to the debate. This initiative oversees a robust curriculum, including an MBA major and undergraduate concentration in Impact, Value, and Sustainable Business, featuring over thirty courses like "Strategies for Impact." The author readily admits to being far from a disinterested observer, a stance that lends both credibility and a degree of self-awareness to the counter-argument.
While acknowledging that Marquis’s diagnosis contains uncomfortable truths that many critics might prefer to overlook, the Wharton professor contends that the hyperbolic nature of the abolitionist call ultimately undermines its practical utility. The argument is made that even with the stimulating effect of hyperbole, Marquis’s diagnosis fails to logically support his drastic conclusion or offer a feasible pathway for reform. Instead, the author proposes a more constructive evaluative framework: business schools should be judged on their efficacy in preparing future managers to understand how firms generate value across a spectrum of capitals—financial, human, social, and natural—and, crucially, how employees, customers, investors, regulators, and communities respond when this multi-capital value creation is neglected.
The Case Method: A Double-Edged Sword
Central to the critique of business education is the case method, a pedagogical cornerstone. This approach typically involves students analyzing a condensed account of a business problem, assuming the role of the central manager, and formulating a course of action. While lauded for fostering dynamic classroom discussions—a method the Wharton professor employs almost exclusively, often utilizing self-authored cases freely available online—the method is not without its flaws. The author concedes that some cases may indeed overly emphasize the executive’s perspective. However, it is argued that cases are not immutable texts but flexible teaching materials. Faculty possess the autonomy to select, write, and adapt them to integrate the perspectives of a broader range of stakeholders, including workers, regulators, and communities. Cases can be crafted to present both the firm’s viewpoint and those of its challengers, explicitly linking managerial actions to system-level outcomes. This, the author asserts, is a deliberate choice available to business schools and their faculty, a point echoed by Brayden King’s reflections on the case method critique.
Marquis’s more damning indictment of how many cases are produced, however, is harder to dismiss. He highlights a problematic practice where featured companies review and approve cases, often leading to the softening or outright removal of unflattering details. The infamous example of Harvard cases praising Enron prior to the revelation of its colossal fraud serves as a stark reminder of the potential for teaching materials to inadvertently function as reputation management tools. The Wharton professor agrees that such conditions necessitate transparency from schools about the circumstances under which their educational content is generated.
Incentives, Rankings, and the "Win-Win" Delusion
Beyond the case method, Marquis correctly identifies several systemic issues plaguing business education. He points out that management ideas often gain traction more for their catchiness than their empirical validity. Furthermore, the relentless pursuit of high rankings, the influence of donors, and the allure of corporate partnerships frequently distort academic priorities and institutional missions. The "win-win" narrative—the seductive notion that "doing good reliably pays"—has been significantly oversold. The author concurs, noting that some prominent studies supporting this claim rested on weak data or, critically, failed to replicate. Equally important is the observation that voluntary pledges, such as the Business Roundtable’s highly publicized 2019 statement on stakeholder capitalism, are an insufficient substitute for genuine accountability. The letter, despite its noble intentions, achieved little substantive change because the underlying incentives governing executive pay, board compositions, and investor expectations remained largely unaltered.
Further evidence supporting a critical view of conventional business education comes from research by Daron Acemoglu and his colleagues. Their studies in the United States and Denmark revealed that firms appointing managers with business degrees tended to cut wages and reduce labor’s share of income. Crucially, these firms did not concurrently exhibit gains in productivity or accelerated growth. While Shivaram Rajgopal rightly notes that these studies lack direct evidence on the specific curriculum these managers received—suggesting alternative influences such as peer groups, corporate culture, or existing pay structures—the findings nevertheless raise a critical question for business schools: Do their graduates primarily create value, or do they merely redistribute it? The author firmly believes that business schools must be held accountable for providing a compelling answer to this fundamental query.
Abolition: A Flawed Prescription for Systemic Issues
Despite the validity of many of Marquis’s critiques, the Wharton professor, along with other scholars, argues that the identified problems do not warrant the radical step of abolition. Nicolai Foss, for instance, highlights a crucial weakness in Marquis’s argument: much of what he describes constitutes an incentive problem rather than an inherent essence problem of business education. The interconnected gears of high starting salaries (which attract students to consulting and finance), placement numbers (which boost tuition, donations, and rankings), and the reward structures within the academic environment are clearly identifiable and, therefore, potentially amenable to change.
Foss’s incisive question, "compared with what?", further underscores the limitations of the abolitionist stance. Eliminating business schools would not magically dissipate the pressures exerted by rankings, donors, employers, or students’ understandable need for viable career paths. Public policy schools are reliant on government funding and philanthropic contributions; sociology departments grapple with their own internal orthodoxies. Even mission-driven organizations can succumb to "mission washing," paralleling corporate "greenwashing." Were business schools to disappear, it is highly probable that similar programs would re-emerge under new guises—perhaps even as "schools for organizing"—only to confront many of the exact same systemic pressures.
The Path to Durable Reform: Stakeholder Demand and Curricular Evolution
Genuine institutional change, the argument continues, rarely stems from a single eloquent critique. Instead, it arises when the diverse constituencies that sustain an institution begin to collectively demand a different approach. Employers, prospective students, donors, investors, current employees, and regulators all possess the power to reshape the market for management education. They can demand graduates equipped to evaluate multi-capital impacts, discern value extraction from true creation, and adeptly manage stakeholder relationships, moving beyond a narrow maximization of financial return.
While external pressure is vital, internal transformation within the classroom and the research process remains paramount. Business schools fundamentally shape the conceptual frameworks through which future managers perceive the firm. They influence what is categorized as a cost, whose interests are deemed relevant, and which forms of evidence are considered rigorous. The challenge, therefore, is not merely to introduce an elective course on social movements or sustainability. It demands a fundamental recalibration of how core subjects like finance, accounting, strategy, operations, and organizational behavior are taught, for it is within this core curriculum that a school’s true values are instantiated.
Shivaram Rajgopal offers another critical corrective, observing that many of the negative phenomena Marquis laments—from short-term thinking to the suppression of dissent—are deeply rooted in the pay systems, hierarchical structures, and reporting pressures inherent within companies themselves. He draws a compelling analogy to the engineering profession, noting that engineers have made similar mistakes under analogous pressures. Yet, following disasters like the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion in 1986, the response was not to abolish engineering schools but to reform them. This perspective strengthens the case for better management education, not its abandonment. The source of organizational failure often resides within the firm’s operational realities rather than solely within the classroom. This underscores the urgent need for more rigorous research by business school professors into how incentives distort judgment, how leaders stifle bad news, and how managers can ensure critical information—including stakeholder grievances and aspirations—flows effectively upward. Business schools serve as the crucial nexus where this vital research intersects with the individuals destined to lead organizations.
Reclaiming Business’s Public Purpose: Beyond Private Goods
Marquis’s critique also posits that business inherently pursues private goods, contrasting it with professions like medicine and law, whose purposes (health and justice, respectively) are overtly public. The Wharton professor challenges this dichotomy, arguing that economies must constantly make critical decisions regarding the allocation of scarce resources—whether to semiconductors, cancer drugs, wind turbines, or housing. The prosperity generated by these choices directly underpins the funding and functioning of institutions dedicated to law, health, and justice. Firms, in this view, are organizations that make these resource allocation decisions under conditions of uncertainty, thereby serving both private and public interests simultaneously.
Crucially, the argument is not that every profitable endeavor automatically creates social value. Profits can arise from genuine innovation and customer service, but equally from monopolistic practices, securing political favors, or exploitative labor. The imperative, therefore, is not to indiscriminately laud all profitable activity as socially beneficial, but rather to rigorously distinguish between productive enterprise and value extraction. This, the author concludes, is precisely the intellectual and pedagogical work that business schools are uniquely positioned to undertake.
The historical trajectory of capitalism provides compelling evidence of its capacity to generate enormous prosperity. Business-led growth, in conjunction with public investment, trade liberalization, educational advancements, and institutional reforms, has been instrumental in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. The World Bank estimates that nearly 800 million people in China and approximately 270 million in India, for example, ascended above extreme-poverty lines in recent decades. Firms played a pivotal role by creating jobs, generating incomes, and developing transformative technologies, even within broader systemic frameworks shaped by governments and public institutions. The failures of this system, therefore, should be addressed by enhancing its capacity to create value across natural, social, human, and financial capitals, rather than by dismissing business schools as beyond repair.
A Constructive Blueprint for Reform: The Four Capitals and Policy Levers
The proposed reforms pivot on a fundamental shift in perspective. The author is not advocating for the simplistic notion that "doing good always pays." Some environmental and social investments indeed bolster performance, but others involve genuine tradeoffs, yield returns only over extended horizons, or externalize costs onto vulnerable populations with limited recourse for compensation. Furthermore, some systemic problems simply cannot be resolved through voluntary corporate action alone.
The core argument is that conventional business education often relegates the effects on workers, communities, and the environment to the periphery, treating them as mere side issues or policy concerns. This approach overlooks the increasing evidence that these "externalities" profoundly influence the bottom line, particularly over the long term and at a systemic level. Financial capital, it is argued, is but one component of the intricate productive system upon which firms rely. Human capital encompasses the skills, health, and judgment of employees; social capital includes trust, cooperation, and legitimacy; and natural capital comprises the physical systems (e.g., energy, water, land, climate stability) essential for production. These capitals are inextricably linked and interact dynamically.
A decision designed to boost quarterly earnings, for instance, might simultaneously weaken the workforce, alienate a community, exacerbate climate change, increase regulatory exposure, or elevate financing costs. While these effects may not immediately appear on financial statements, they eventually manifest, often after the decision-makers have moved on. Investors may reprice the company or increase its cost of capital; employees may depart or cease sharing critical information; customers may switch loyalties; suppliers may demand revised terms; communities may actively oppose permits or mobilize politically; regulators may intervene; and physical climate risks are projected to intensify. These are the demonstrable mechanisms through which impacts on natural, social, and human capital translate into changes in risk, opportunity, and financial value, either directly or through the reactions of affected stakeholders.
Specific managerial choices illustrate this dynamic: cutting training may inflate current margins while eroding long-term skills; outsourcing may reduce immediate costs but deplete institutional knowledge and innovative capacity; minimizing maintenance may boost short-term returns but accumulate future liabilities. These are not mere ethical exhortations but claims about cause and effect, which can be empirically tested and, if necessary, disproven. This framework serves to constrain managers, providing a more robust accountability than mere subjective discretion.
A valid objection, raised by Foss and others, is that asking managers to weigh every stakeholder concern can grant them excessive discretion without clear guidance on how to prioritize. The proposed solution is not to train managers to indiscriminately "consider all stakeholders" but to improve the surrounding signals that inform them of material stakeholder concerns. Markets, when prices accurately reflect real costs and public policy rewards productive investment, can coordinate knowledge remarkably well. Even Milton Friedman, a staunch advocate of shareholder primacy, recognized that pollution and other "neighborhood effects" could justify public intervention to ensure prices reflect costs imposed on others.
Public policy already employs such mechanisms across various sectors. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit has been instrumental in financing millions of affordable rental units. Workforce development policies support training programs and registered apprenticeships. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), passed in 2022, leveraged tax incentives to stimulate investment in clean-energy manufacturing and low-carbon infrastructure, though the 2025 budget law rolled back some of its provisions, serving as a potent reminder that such incentives are only as durable as the stakeholder coalitions sustaining them. The European Union’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS) places a price on carbon emissions. Anti-money-laundering regulations mandate financial institutions to identify and report suspicious activities.
Similar principles could be extended to reward affordable housing initiatives, comprehensive workforce development, resilient supply chains, low-carbon energy solutions, and impact investing. Conversely, policies could tax or restrict carbon emissions, excessive water consumption, corrupt payments, money laundering, and short-term financial transactions that destabilize productive investment. These are not speculative abstractions but extensions of established governmental tools. The central point is that the fundamental rules of capitalism can be designed to make socially productive activities more profitable and socially destructive ones more costly, provided that voters demand such policies. Where policy gaps persist, entrepreneurs and investors should be encouraged to develop business models and investment strategies that mitigate negative externalities and capture value from positive ones. Business schools, in turn, should be actively engaged in evaluating these rules, models, and investment theses, striving for their continuous improvement, and preparing leaders to operate within—and further refine—these evolving frameworks.
In a previously published article co-authored with Rachelle Sampson, the author outlined specific questions that students could immediately integrate into finance, marketing, operations, or strategy classes: "What are the effects on human capital?", "How do we measure social capital impacts?", "What is the impact on natural capital and what are the associated risks?", and "How does this decision affect regulatory exposure and long-term legal liabilities?" These questions are designed not to replace traditional financial analysis using discounted cash flows but to enrich it, making it more realistic and ensuring that the value created is genuinely sustainable.
Accountability and the Power of Stakeholder Demands
For these reforms to materialize, a shift in accountability is required. Schools will not undertake such profound changes simply because a few professors advocate for them or publish editorials. Change will occur when the diverse stakeholders who sustain these institutions fundamentally alter their demands. Employers can begin asking whether graduates possess the analytical skills to evaluate impacts on natural, social, and human capital, and to differentiate true value creation from mere extraction. Prospective applicants and current employees can scrutinize whether a program genuinely prepares individuals for meaningful work aligned with contemporary challenges, or if it merely serves as a pipeline to outdated career paths. Investors and donors can strategically fund research that rigorously links multi-capital impacts to risk, opportunity, and long-term sustainable value. Accrediting bodies and ranking organizations must evolve their metrics to measure what schools actually teach and produce, rather than solely focusing on starting salaries. Journal editors and peer reviewers can prioritize and value academic work that is both intellectually rigorous and genuinely consequential.
These same stakeholders also bear the responsibility of pressing governments to adopt policies that reward beneficial societal outcomes—such as affordable housing, comprehensive workforce training, low-carbon energy, and impact investing—while simultaneously pricing or restricting detrimental activities like pollution, water depletion, corruption, money laundering, and destabilizing financial speculation. The reform of business schools and the reform of public policy are intrinsically linked, as both shape the incentive structures under which firms operate.
Finally, a crucial element of accountability involves pushing more organizations to adopt standardized impact accounting methodologies, such as those developed by the Value Balancing Alliance and the International Foundation for Valuing Impacts (IFVI). This movement should also direct capital towards businesses that generate attractive financial returns after accounting for their cost of capital and their measurable impacts on natural, social, and human capital. Organizations like GIST Impact, with whom Wharton Impact has a data partnership, are at the forefront of translating these complex approaches into actionable data, robust valuation tools, and decision-useful analysis.
Building Alliances for Enduring Change
This comprehensive vision marks the key divergence from Marquis’s institutional prescription. While acknowledging the valuable service his critique has performed in challenging business schools to confront shortcomings they have too often minimized, the author posits that durable reform is far more likely to emerge from building strategic alliances both within and across institutions, rather than by dismissing an entire category of schools. It is worth recalling that Joseph Wharton founded the school bearing his name with the explicit purpose of addressing "the social problems incident to our civilization."
Business schools collectively possess immense intellectual, financial, and human capital. Reformers are actively leveraging, augmenting, and redirecting this capital. Wharton Impact stands as one example of this ongoing work, complemented by related efforts at peer institutions from which the author draws inspiration and learns. No single institution has definitively "solved" the problem; none of these business schools are perfect, yet none are fatally flawed. Institutional change is inherently a protracted process, demanding sustained coalition-building among faculty, students, administrators, employers, donors, and external partners. As the author’s advisor, Oliver Williamson, frequently emphasized, the process of comparative institutional analysis and reform is typically "modest, slow, molecular, and definitive." It entails arduous work that rarely garners the immediate attention of a widely read editorial.
This incremental, collaborative work is undeniably less sensational than calling for abolition. However, it is precisely this sustained effort that holds the greater promise for driving meaningful and lasting change. A movement for enhanced business education must be inclusive, drawing in individuals who may hold differing political views but share a common conviction that firms should create enduring value, treat workers equitably, and safeguard the environment. Such a movement must be grounded in empirical evidence, eschewing mere slogans. Understanding the precise conditions under which financial returns are enhanced by socially and environmentally responsible business practices, and when they are not, constitutes a critical research agenda for which business schools are exceptionally well-suited. Yet, research alone will not alter the entrenched incentives that dictate what gets taught, funded, and published. Fundamental reform will necessitate organized and sustained pressure from all stakeholders who benefit from, operate within, and support these vital institutions.
Without such concerted pressure, the proposed reforms risk remaining superficial. Schools might add a few elective courses without reforming the core curriculum, issue aspirational statements without altering underlying incentives, and celebrate "impact" without rigorous measurement. However, Marquis is profoundly correct on another crucial point that must not be overlooked: many students enter business school driven by a genuine desire to address the pressing crises our economic system has inadvertently helped to create—climate change, democratic erosion, pervasive inequality, and a palpable loss of trust in institutions. These aspiring leaders deserve an education that is worthy of their noble impulses and commensurate with the formidable challenges of our era.
Abolishing business schools would not diminish the power of business itself, nor would it enhance our collective capacity to address these grand social and economic challenges. On the contrary, it would render that power less visible, less subject to internal university scrutiny, and consequently, far more difficult to harness for constructive societal ends. The more effective and responsible response is to empower business schools to be rigorously evidence-based, candid about their failures, deeply connected to real-world practice, and unequivocally accountable for the impacts of the enterprises and systems they help to create.
The author remains convinced that business and capitalism possess an extraordinary potential to generate broad-based prosperity. The paramount task ahead is to meticulously construct the institutions, design the rules, and cultivate the leaders capable of transforming this promise into tangible reality. This calls for a collaborative movement, one that learns diligently from business’s past failures, strategically builds upon its immense capacity for wealth creation, and rigorously holds it accountable for both the positive and negative impacts that underpin that prosperity. Such a constructive dialogue, focused on systemic improvement, offers a far more productive path forward than the debate over abolition.
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