What Did George W. Bush Learn in Business School?

No Very Much Lex Loeb Contributor Network . Business School was a mystery to me until I happened to live in a dormatory complex with a lot of them. I learned a lot about the Business School type and the also about the Law School type too. This was a top rated business school. I was an undergraduate and curious about what the point of business school was. Judging from the average business school student I was not very impressed. Most were completely entrenched in following sports scores. They were very different from other types of graduate students except for the older ones who came from working in business first. They were different and it seemed more interested in learning something and not part of the party set. The law Students were only interested in the sports scores if they were vicarously winning. They were forced to study more. Law students dissappeared into the law library and did not come out except to eat. They often slept in that library. The graduate level business school students told me that the sole reason they were spending their time and money in the school was to get the ticket they needed for the higher level job they wanted. Law school students seemed way more competitive. A respectable number of the law students were nerds. No nerds in the business school class at all. The biggest group of nerds I met later in a graduate school dormatory complex for math, physics and engineering students. They were people who were genuinely curious about things, not all dressed up like the law students and not interested at all in sports scores. No these graduate students liked games and puzzles--the more complicated the better or they were spent their time with model trains or writing poetry in mathmatic formulas. Nerds had about ten times the mental depth of the average business student. They may have been getting their ticket to success too but they did not know what it was for or how to use it. The business students were just more practical. I had one roommate who was an economics graduate student and I used to pick out all the pennies he frequently threw in the garbage can. I probably could have learned something from him , The business school students would tell me they would graduate and make a hell of a lot of money and that was the idea for their being in business school. It occured to me that a university with a business school teaching lots of people how to make a lot of money as soon as they got their degree and ticket to do so seemed a little bit too good to be true. The interesting thing is that indeed they did get out of graduate school and had the ticket and did find starting jobs that payed two to five times the average national salary in the first year. I learned about business not going to business school and I get to review the great things they are doing for businesses and the economy and the more I see the less impressed I am. The giant corporations are the ones that want business administration graduates to work for them. The big public corporations hire lots of business adminsistration people and it just does not seem to bring back the magic that the original founders of these companies seemed to have in the beginning. I keep seeing the stock options go up and up and corporations essentially raped by management leaving me to wonder if these guys all have business administration degrees? Is the problem that business theory learned in business schools is little value in the real world of business? I also sense that all the rotten derivatives that have caused so much economic turmoil were created by business school graduates. I am sure a well trained business administration graduate knows more about business than I do but I am amazed to see major corporations like General Motors that can hire as many MBAs as they want to cannot become a permanently solid stable financial corporation. General Motors is a company that had plenty of chances to get things right, they recover reach record sales and then spin back out of control again. .