Thread by @wmnjoya

On my thread this Sunday, I'm writing on why Kenya should ban all business degrees at undergraduate level and have an entry age of 27 years, if not 30, for MBA programs. University business schools are going to destroy the economy and our lives.
@CUE_Kenya

Just for the record, this idea is not original to me. Many academics in liberal arts programs have called into question the value of business degrees, both in terms of academic rigor and what the graduates do in the workplace.
chronicle.com/interactives/2…

First I'll start with the roots of business/accounting/auditing professions. These professions were used in slavery to treat human beings as machines whose "output" was measured and whose value "depreciated."

hbr.org/2013/09/planta…

What accounting and management careerists call "efficiency" is more like how to squeeze as much as one can from workers without being accused of human rights abuse, and keep shareholders happy with the profit margin. They are therefore taught to ignore our humanity.

Because of this deficit in their training, accounting and management careerists destroy public institutions because they equate balance sheets and profits with better human outcomes like reduction in infant mortality, creativity and innovation, or less crime.

In other words, money-management professionals (whom I now call MMPs) corrupt our idea of success by equating human and social success to profits. The role of the media is to keep showing us profits and CEOs as measures of success. This is corruption at the level of ideas.

It points to a corruption at the level of institutions and society. The more power MMPs are given to make decisions, the more corruption there is within institutions and in the larger society. The autocracy of MMPs corrupts our morals, identities, emotions, politics...everything.

In higher ed, administrators increasingly employ MMPs who alienate academics in making decisions; which is called "administrative bloat." The net result is corruption for several reasons. A summary is here, but I'll also elaborate how it works. washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septo…

1. Administrators calculate successful programs not by research or contribution to the public good, but by how much money they make in terms of student enrolment. That makes lecturers dumb down, tweak curriculum, rename programs, to attract students with "market friendly" names.

Because "successful" programs are also measured by student satisfaction and completion, lecturers are forced to avoid challenging content so that they can be popular, and to accept when students take shortcuts, including paying others to write student theses.

2. Another thing MMPs do is slash the budgets for full-time faculty so that they MMPs dominate decision making by sheer numbers. This increases the number of part-time faculty whose payments the MMPs can delay as long as they want.
I've elaborated here.
wandianjoya.com/blog/how-kenya…

More power and more exploitation makes part-time lecturers vulnerable to abuse and misuse.

In other words, it corrupts full-time faculty as well by making them tyrants. But it also makes full-timers refuse to do any work outside teaching unless it's paid as contract work.

This raises the cost of higher ed. Students have to pay more while full-timers and MMPs collaborate in treating unis as cash cows. But unis cant increase fees to infinity, so how do unis make up for the deficit?

They turn unis into real estate and faculty into consultants.

By the time unis are talking the language of PPPs and self sufficiency, they've lost the plot of education. So media steps in with the "useless degree" narrative and through CUE, GoK starts barking quality assurance. Which means more regulation fees. And the hole gets deeper.

When we say that more regulation will onlymake things worse, the MMPs bark at us "what's your solution." Their education prevents them from understanding "theory," because they only learn balance sheets and profit. Not people or systems.

The real solution is to get them out of university administration and increase the number of full-time faculty and their voice in decision making. More full time faculty brings down admin costs. But MMPs cannot retrench themselves. They retrench the faculty and essential staff.

This is the situation replicated across different sectors. When the Bsc, BEd or BA cannot get a job in the sector they trained for, it's not true what the media says, that the problem is degrees or that you are job seekers instead of creators. It's that the jobs are with MMPs.

The money and energy that can be used to innovate, improve services, institutions and even the economy, go to administrators, more bullying management styles, more corruption and higher salaries and allowances for MMPs.

Now back to my issue with university business schools.

Kenyan unis are cutting down on training professionals, or scientists and artists, and training more MMPs. 20% of Kenyan students are in business programs. The arts and sciences, social sciences, STEM, share the rest.

That means MMPs are the majority in any organization.

This is a big factor in the large scale corruption across the board. But we are really going to feel it most in healthcare. As we saw with Nairobi Women's, MMPs entrench a culture that leads people to sell our blood, poison us or do whatever to exploit us at our most vulnerable.

But health professionals will not be able to say much because they will be outgunned by MMPs. With these health MBAs, universities are increasing the number of hospital managers but not the number of actual professionals who will treat.

That's why I propose

1. An end to business degrees at Bachelor's. This will force us to employ medics, engineers, teachers etc who will compel institions to use professional expertise and outcomes in policy and management. It will also reduce corruption and improve employment.

2. Insist on a minimum age for entering MBA programs. Grads will have other professional experience, and will not be so arrogant in insisting that shares and profits mean more than professionalism and human welfare. Society benefits all round.

END