Truly Useless Information

Free Exchange has an interesting post today about Insidious MBAs.  It adds to the general sentiment in the comments from my last post on the subject -- namely that MBA students arrive at B-School with no morals (or an amoral world view). 

Shortly after the Enron debacle [my professor] asked me how business schools could better teach ethics to help reduce such behaviour in the future. I told him you cannot teach ethics to MBAs. By the time you're an MBA student (typically mid to late 20s) you're either an ethical person or you're not. No business school class can make you realise embezzling money is wrong if that's your inclination.

I agree with that sentiment but will add that MBA professors are definitely trying their hardest to turn out highly moral individuals. Nearly all our professors dispense lessons and teach with an almost heavy-handed approach to morals.  The types of books we're given to read (especially in the more qualitative classes like HR, Management, Leadership) when not conveying direct strategic lessons often extol the benefits of highly virtuous management.  Gentle, magnimous management styles are encouraged and case studies back up the benefits of leading in such a way.  The benefits of corporate social responsibility and the stupidity of trying to defraud customers or shareholders is a constant, constant, constant drumbeat. 

Professors should be applauded for their work in this regard, but what if examining bad moral decisions isn't enough? Mark Thoma points to the problems with financial engineering and says MBAs and Financial Engineers may not be learning enough (or enough of the right stuff) as it is. As his post notes, and as Nassim Taleb has famously decried in his book The Black Swan, our Financial Engineering program teaches Black-Scholes up the yin-yang but little else, but Black-Scholes is a formula that doesn't translate beyond academic mathematics -- it simply doesn't work in the real world.

So the FE students and the brave few MBAs who took this class have spent four months studying their brains out for nothing. This, despite the fact that our derivatives professor admitted to the class yesterday that, as a former engineer, he's quite familiar with Nyquist Sampling, Brownian Motion and Mandelbrot's fractals and could probably teach them. 

Why he hasn't adjusted the program until now is probably because there has been no demand on Wall Street for quants with knowledge of these theorems. I recall an old Jack Welch speech from a few years ago to a bunch of students about how the market shapes what kind of MBA students the b-schools churn out.  If the market wants quants who only know Black-Scholes, then that's what the b-schools will deliver. Why would academia bother to teach them something different when Wall Street only wants Black-Scholes disciples?  Students won't get hired, paid a ridiculous salary and be able to give a portion of their piles of money back to the school if their skill sets don't match what Wall Street wants.

I suppose I might be one of the last MBA students to learn Black-Scholes. It would seem the financial world is changing and with it, B-School curriculums will change as well.  This is obviously disheartening to me for more than a few reasons, but it's mostly frustrating because I could have completely skipped derivatives (which has, by far, been the most difficult and challenging class I've had) and still earned an MBA in Finance. Derivatives is an elective course for us MBAs, and only a required course for the FE students.

So I could have easily graduated without putting myself through learning a difficult skill set I'm never going to use not just because it's out-of-vogue but because it's also completely useless.

Awesome.  None of this is helping me study for the derivatives final I have in two weeks.