Oxford Said’s Dean Speaks
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Dr. Peter Tufano, dean of Oxford’s Said Business School, spoke to the Hindu Business Line recently and commented on the rapidly morphing business school market:
• “Business school rankings … are incredibly imperfect.”
• “There’s a lot of movement in this space [management education], which is discomforting as a dean but it’s great for the market. You can’t teach about competition and believe in competition being good but say, ‘It shouldn’t apply to me’.”
• “There was a dominance of the US in the MBA market. I am not saying that’s gone away completely, but it’s changing… I suspect that 10 or 20 years from now, those rankings could look even more different than they do now.”
• “[Business schools] say they want students to go into all kinds of sectors, not just finance and consulting. But the rankings on the basis of salary encourage schools to encourage students to go only into the highest paying jobs.”
• “Increasingly, there is a need for depth. Whether it’s a one-year programme or two-year programme, business schools are not set up to deliver depth. Because we are inherently organised around a number of disciplines, like finance, accounting and marketing.”
• Hindu Business Line: Do you see idealism vanishing from the fresh crop of students coming in to B-schools? “Absolutely to the contrary!… We run the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship. In March, we run the Skoll World Forum, which is the world’s leading gathering of social entrepreneurs. We have a cluster of extraordinarily idealistic students…. My students are far less cynical and far more idealistic than many others I have met. It’s quite refreshing.”
Source: “‘B-school rankings are incredibly imperfect,” Hindu Business Line, by Gokul Krishnamurthy, April 3, 2012.
This article was originally published on Paul Bodine’s blog. Paul is a graduate admissions consultant with over 13 years of experience, having helped hundreds of applicants get into their dream business, law, medical, and graduate schools. He has also published several books on graduate admissions.
