Chris Marquis has taught in business schools for more than twenty years, at Harvard, Cornell and Cambridge, and spent a decade at Harvard Business School writing dozens of case studies, some of them best sellers. So when he argues in a guest essay for The New York Times that "We don't need to 'fix' business schools. We need to abolish them," the provocation is worth taking seriously, and so is the argument underneath it.
That argument holds. Business schools can't be reformed from inside, because the thing that needs reforming is the teaching model itself: a case method that rehearses students, case after case, in being the one person who decides, and a "win-win" story assuring them the decision costs nobody much. Ethics and sustainability electives get absorbed into that model and leave it intact. For executives who hire, promote and train managers, the consequence arrives long before any university abolishes anything. An MBA is weak evidence of management ability, and corporate leadership programmes built on the same template inherit the same flaw.
The case method rehearses one job
Marquis's most useful evidence comes from his own classroom. In "Rob Parson at Morgan Stanley," a staple Harvard case he has taught many times, students play the manager deciding whether to promote an abrasive star producer. They vote and role-play the difficult conversation. What they rarely ask, he writes, is whether investment-banking culture manufactured Parson in the first place. The format makes that question hard to reach, because every case is engineered to end at a decision point for a single protagonist, and Harvard's own description of the method has students imagining themselves in the decision-maker's role. Harvard sold nearly 17 million cases in 2024. That is a lot of rehearsal for one job.
The raw material is compromised as well. Marquis says companies held final approval over the cases he drafted, with their lawyers and PR staff reviewing, and that events reflecting poorly on the firm were softened or cut. Every HBS case carries a disclaimer that it is "not intended to serve … as sources of primary data." Before Enron's fraud surfaced, he notes, at least five HBS cases presented its model admiringly. A curriculum assembled from approved narratives about winners teaches students to read a sanitised story as strategy and then act on it with confidence. An ethics module can't correct that, since it is taught the same way.
The wage evidence is thin. It still points one way.
Marquis rests his strongest empirical claim on work by Daron Acemoglu, Alex He and Daniel le Maire, published as an NBER working paper in 2022. Firms that put business-educated leaders in charge cut wages and labour share, and got nothing for it in productivity, sales, investment or employment. The mechanism, the authors argue, is rent-sharing: "non-business managers share profits with their workers, whereas business managers do not." They attribute the effect to the education itself rather than to the kind of person who enrols.
The evidence deserves the disciplined scepticism Marquis says business cases lack. It is one working paper, not a peer-reviewed article, covering two countries, and the revised December 2023 version measures CEOs, not managers generally. We found no independent replication. "What tends to happen when you put an M.B.A. in charge" is a bigger claim than one paper can carry.
Even discounted, the finding is awkward for the degree's defenders. The revised paper also finds that boards with more MBA directors are much more likely to appoint a business-degree CEO. That is the loop Marquis describes, visible in the data: people trained to see themselves as the decider choose others trained the same way. If the degree doesn't buy productivity, a board that prefers it is buying a distribution choice and calling it talent.
If the degree doesn't buy productivity, a board that prefers it is buying a distribution choice and calling it talent.
Reform has been tried. Look where it was filed.
The strongest objection is that business schools have already changed in recent decades. Stakeholder capitalism entered syllabuses in the 2010s; Harvard now promises "leaders who make a difference in the world" and Wharton a "quest for positive global impact." Marquis's own examples, Stuart Hart's impact-focused business degree at the University of Vermont and the required sustainability course Marquis introduced at Cambridge, show the model can bend. On this view, abolishing a whole category when targeted change is already under way is overreach.
Read those examples closely and they argue for replacement. Hart, by Marquis's account, built the Vermont degree only after trying every internal route to reform MBA curriculums and concluding the institution was the problem; it is a clean-sheet design, with sustainability running through the whole programme instead of sitting in one elective. The Cambridge course sits at the very end of the programme and faces some pressure to be reduced or eliminated amid the backlash against sustainability. As for the stakeholder decade, Marquis cites research finding that companies signing a pledge to that ethos changed little on wages, investment, governance or climate, and that several foundational win-win studies relied on flawed data or failed replication. Reform measured by the course catalogue has happened. We have seen no evidence that it has changed how graduates run companies.
Employers hire from this model. They can stop copying it.
Marquis is weakest on what replaces the business school. His preferred direction, organisation theorist Martin Parker's "schools for organizing" that study co-ops, unions and social movements alongside the shareholder corporation, is an attractive syllabus. The essay says nothing about whether its graduates get hired or are ready to run anything. That gap is real, though it is no reason to keep tuning a model whose output the evidence already questions.
Executives don't have to wait for universities to settle it, because they control the demand side. A succession process that treats the MBA as a proxy for judgement reproduces the design Marquis describes inside your own walls. So does a CEO search that rewards decisiveness over evidence of shared gains, and so does an in-house leadership academy built on short cases ending at a choice for one senior protagonist. Ask a candidate what happened to the people around them after they decided, and build an internal programme where the case doesn't end with the boss.
The business school works as designed. It trains people to decide quickly from an approved story, and in our view employers have long rewarded exactly that, which is why a better elective won't change it. If the wage evidence survives scrutiny, the cost of that reward has been falling on workers all along. Universities may take a generation to replace the model. Companies can stop rewarding it at the next promotion round.
