Does Business School Research Add Economic Value for Students?
Jonathan P. O'Brien
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Paul L. Drenevich
The University of Alabama
Russell Crook
The University of Tennessee
Craig E. Armstrong
The University of Alabama
Abstract
The scholarly research conducted by business school faculty has long been the subject of intense criticism for lacking relevance and value to practice. In contrast, we theorize that such research is relevant and valuable in that it contributes to what is arguably the most critical metric of relevance for business school students: the economic value they accrue from their education. We investigate this counterargument on a sample of 658 business schools over an 8-year period. We find that research adds significant value in that it can potentially enhance student salaries by up to $24,000 per year. However, we also observe that excessive research activity can lead to diminishing or even negative returns for students, and a research focus solely on elite journals might rob students of the benefits of exposure to a broader array of new ideas
Download the Paper from the Academy of Management Learning & Education here.
Louis Lavelle writes about the research over at Bloomber Businessweek:
About five years ago, Warren Bennis and James O'Toole penned an article for the Harvard Business Review called "How Business Schools Lost Their Way." It was, in many ways, the shot heard round the world. (I was visiting b-schools in China when it came out and people were talking about it there. The same day.) Their premise: that way too much of what passes for research in business schools is an unmitigated waste - abstract financial and economic analysis, increasingly focused on theory instead of practice, that's completely irrelevant to the real world of business.
A new study calls that conclusion into question. It was co-authored by Jonathan P. O'Brien of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Paul L. Drnevich and Craig E. Armstrong of the University of Alabama, and T. Russell Crook of the University of Tennessee and published in the December-February issue of Academy of Management Learning and Education.
The authors found that scholarly research at business schools appears to add as much as 21 percent to the MBA students' future salaries, or about $24,000 a year. "The result strongly suggests that research-intensive schools generally do a superior job in helping their students acquire and hone their knowledge, skills, and abilities, which pays financial returns to the students through their future employment," the authors write. "One might conclude that the actual state of the relevance of business school research is not nearly as dire as some have suggested."
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