A professor wants business schools abolished. What do teens learn first?

Christopher Marquis, a professor at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, argued in the New York Times on October 18th that business schools should be abolished, and he devoted a large part of his argument to the case method, the 10-to-20-page decision exercise at the heart of an MBA classroom.[1] The essay is one professor’s opinion. The question underneath it gets less attention: what a student learns about business before a master’s degree program. Business is the largest degree field in U.S. higher education, yet in FinBizify’s July 2026 review of high school graduation rules, no state or D.C. required a standalone high school business course.[2][3][4]

What the case method asks of students

Harvard Business School’s archive describes students studying cases of 10 to 20 pages, then discussing them in class while imagining themselves in a decision-maker’s role. The instructor plays “planner, host, moderator, devil’s advocate, fellow-student, and judge.” The method dates to the 1920s at Harvard.[5]

Marquis objects that cases narrow students to the decision facing one senior manager, that the companies in cases he wrote at Harvard held final approval, and that cases mostly feature winners.[1] He writes that “the modern business school is designed to promote dealmaking, simplification and optimization.”[1]

What the research adds, and what it leaves out

Marquis cites work by the economist Daron Acemoglu and coauthors. In their working paper, wages and labor’s share of income fell after a firm appointed a CEO with a business degree, relative to non-business managers, and those firms did not see higher output, investment or employment growth afterward.[6] The paper is about CEOs with business degrees, not MBAs specifically, and it measures what happened to wages, not what students learned.

Marquis also writes that failures and dead ends are rarely considered in cases. The public record holds them, sometimes in the company’s own words. Two examples below of business decisions that didn’t go as planned.

Netflix’s third-quarter 2011 shareholder letter reported that the company lost more than 800,000 domestic subscribers after its DVD pricing changes during the summer of 2011, and noted that it had announced and then retracted a separate brand for its DVD service, Qwikster.[7]

Quibi, a short-form streaming venture, launched in April 2020 after raising $1.75 billion and announced its shutdown that October. Its founders said the cause was likely the idea, the timing, or both.[8]

How many people reach the field

Business is the largest degree field in U.S. higher education, though the federal category is broad and includes marketing and some service fields such as culinary arts. The National Center for Education Statistics counted 375,400 bachelor’s degrees in business in 2021-22, 19% of all bachelor’s degrees, and 205,800 master’s degrees in business, 23% of the total.[2][3]

By one research firm’s count, undergraduate business enrollment rose 4.8% from spring 2024 to spring 2025.[9] Harvard’s MBA class is a narrow door by comparison: 9,856 applicants, 12% admitted, 1,970 enrolled, with tuition listed at $74,910 and average fellowship aid of $46,949 per student.[10] An earlier note covered how price shapes who reaches the newer alternatives to college, too.

The groundwork before the decision point

A case assumes a student already knows how a company earns revenue, what a margin is and why a price change can cost customers. High school business education is where that groundwork could start. In FinBizify’s review of graduation rules in all 50 states and D.C., 50 of 51 jurisdictions treat business as an elective or an optional pathway, and New Jersey’s standard blends financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial content.[4] As of June 2026, personal finance (banking, budgeting, loans and taxes), by contrast, is a graduation requirement in a majority of states.

Whether business schools should exist is a debate among people who already have the education to evaluate the need. The question for a 16-year-old comes earlier: can they read a real company’s numbers, including the years when things went well and the years when the company got something wrong? FinBizify builds toward that initial base understanding before more advanced education is considered, with lessons on real companies and dated figures, sold to a family directly and kept current as the companies change.

Sources

1. Christopher Marquis, “I Teach at a Business School. It’s Time to Shut Them Down.,” Guest Essay, The New York Times, Oct. 18, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opinion/business-school-mba-harvard-cornell-cambridge.html

2. National Center for Education Statistics, “Undergraduate Degree Fields,” The Condition of Education, May 2024. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta/undergrad-degree-fields

3. National Center for Education Statistics, “Graduate Degree Fields,” The Condition of Education, May 2024. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/ctb/graduate-degree-fields

4. FinBizify, review of state graduation requirements for business education in 50 states and the District of Columbia, July 2026.

5. “Teaching and the Case Method,” Baker Library Special Collections and Archives, Harvard Business School. https://www.library.hbs.edu/special-collections-and-archives/exhibits/case-method/teaching-and-the-case-method

6. Daron Acemoglu, Alex He and Daniel le Maire, “Eclipse of Rent-Sharing: The Effects of Managers’ Business Education on Wages and the Labor Share in the US and Denmark,” working paper, June 2025 revision (first circulated as NBER Working Paper 29874, March 2022). https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2025-10/Eclipse%20of%20Rent-Sharing%20-%20the%20Effects%20of%20Managers%20Business%20Education%20on%20wages%20and%20the%20Labor%20Share%20in%20the%20US%20and%20Denmark.pdf

7. Netflix, Inc., “Letter to Shareholders,” third quarter 2011, Form 8-K exhibit 99.1, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Oct. 24, 2011. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1065280/000119312511278716/d246709dex991.htm

8. “Quibi to shut down after just 6 months,” CNBC, Oct. 21, 2020. https://www.cnbc.com/2020/10/21/quibi-to-shut-down-after-just-6-months.html

9. “In U.S. Higher Ed, Business Is Booming but International Enrollment May Bust,” Poets&Quants for Undergrads, citing Validated Insights, Higher Ed Insights, August 2025. https://poetsandquantsforundergrads.com/news/in-u-s-higher-ed-business-is-booming-but-international-enrollment-may-bust/

10. “Key Metrics,” Harvard Business School Annual Report 2024. https://www.hbs.edu/about/annualreport/2024/key-metrics