American Hustle: The Elite University System is a Swindle
Today’s elite university system claims to be offering higher learning but instead churns out credentialed morons and future felons. And it might not be salvageable.
Image: Harvard University
I was watching some late-night TV with my wife recently and came across a rerun of the “reality” show Kitchen Nightmares and host Gordon Ramsey applying his signature brash management style to turn around a failing restaurant in Manhattan Beach, CA. The owner of the restaurant was a charming young woman and a recent graduate of the USC Marshall School of Business.
While Ramsey asked pointed questions about leadership, problem solving, and organization, the owner giggled, rolled her eyes, and stared blankly into space. She had no answers as to why the restaurant was failing except to blame the staff. The point-of-sale system was at least five years obsolete and repeatedly crashed in the middle of meal service. Nobody could tell Ramsey who was in charge of anything.
It quickly became clear that the owner was utterly incapable of running her business. But she was very keen to show off her framed MBA certificate hanging on a wall in the restaurant’s reception area. (In case you were wondering how much that two-year Marshall USC School of Business MBA cost in 2022-2023, it’s $204,400 including tuition, fees, supplies and living expenses).*
If an MBA program from an elite university is worth a couple of hundred thousand dollars to obtain, a graduate would be expected to emerge from the program possessing some basic business, decision-making, and organizational skills. It was clearly not the case with this restaurant owner.
This got me to thinking about how larger companies are performing with this newly minted crop of elite university graduates running the show.
Failure at the highest level
The recent Bud Light fiasco was caused largely by a marketing executive with an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. Ford’s CEO, currently presiding over the company’s EV program and its disastrous financial performance, is a graduate of Georgetown University and the Anderson School of Management at UCLA. The founder of failed cryptocurrency company FTX graduated from MIT and his parents are both professors at Stanford University. He was recently found guilty on seven counts of fraud and faces over 100 years in prison.
The sheer amount of multi-billion-dollar failures and ethical malfeasance within global corporations in recent years is stunning. Many of these companies have Ivy-Leaguers in key decision-making positions, with a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) at the expense of competent, ethical leadership. After pledging to faithfully execute DEI principles as a key component of being accepted to attend an elite university, these newly credentialed executives have brought it into the workplace.
The result? Unthinking people are being put into positions of authority without possessing basic knowledge of how the world really works and unable to manage their business in an ethical manner. Doctors avoid getting a patient’s informed consent in favor of closing a pharmaceutical sale. Marketing executives deliberately alienate their core customer base to prop up whatever cultural cause is fashionable at the moment. Airline executives lower pilot and mechanic hiring standards to meet arbitrary diversity goals, thus putting passenger safety priorities below that of DEI.
The real value hiring companies place on elite university degrees
Even in past market environments experiencing labor shortages, financial, tech, and other white-collar industries have historically kept university degree requirements intact as a way to weed out unqualified candidates. That is no longer the case, as companies have taken note of the sharply diminished quality of today’s university graduates, and more companies than ever are not requiring a university degree as a condition of employment.
Companies are coming around to the fact that a credential from an elite university is basically an unspoken statement of “I can’t wait to create chaos within your organization and be automatically promoted for the effort.” Have company leaders finally decided that competence, ethics, critical thinking, and a genuine willingness to learn are qualities more important in a candidate than someone with an expensive certificate who has been taught to expect rewards for just showing up (and maybe not even that)?
What was once a network of respected, honored, and credible institutions of higher learning, has become an elite group of insultingly obvious high-end diploma mills churning out terminally mediocre, unethical managers that are incapable of critical thought, taught by over-credentialed quacks that are interested only in their own career advancement and hierarchy status among other professors.
Knowledge has never been easier to obtain – why pay through the nose for it?
Over the past couple of decades it has gotten quite easy for anyone to research anything on any subject and learn as much as you want at an effective zero cost through the use of broadband internet and a computer search engine. Want to know the chemical properties, clinical trials, and side effects of a drug your doctor just prescribed to you? About a minute online and…there it is! No need to consult medical journals in a library. Everything you wanted to know about that drug, perhaps even more than your doctor knows, is right at your fingertips.
With this much access to knowledge and the technology available at an effective zero cost, you have to wonder what universities are selling today. One answer could be that they are selling what they have always sold; that is, teaching you how to think and how to apply the process of investigation and deduction to reach correct conclusions.
Unfortunately, universities have all but lost this focus over the last few decades and nowhere is this more evident than in the admitting and graduating of people for DEI reasons and not on the basis of merit and accomplishment. As a result, the value of a university credential has eroded to the point of being near worthless in the market economy. In fact, current trends point toward elite university graduates receiving fewer job offers and the situation might be worse depending on the university itself.
It has been said that a university education is the most expensive thing people are willing to pay for and not get. As a car guy, I can’t imagine giving a BMW dealer $60,000 and leaving without my 530i sedan.
*Pro Tip: Find an accredited online university offering a similar MBA for roughly ten percent of the tuition cost of an elite university. Yeah, you’ll miss out on the campus experience and you won’t get the university alumni license plate frame, but the focus will be on skills development and not on a bunch of nonsense that has nothing to do with your career.