I did something recently I probably won’t do again: I spent a weekend at Harvard Business School. My main reason for going was to see a set of friends while they’re all in one place. But a small part of me wanted to go because my economic ignorance has occasionally prompted me to think I should go to business school.
During my time in Cambridge, I did find myself briefly seduced by the prospect of an MBA and a job in “banking” or “consulting” that presumably would boost my salary many times over. This sentiment grew stronger when I met people possessed of the airy self-confidence that comes from being enrolled in the world’s premier business school and knowing that soon you’ll be capable of making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Happily, no one was impolitic enough to raise the money issue, though two of my college friends all but accused me of having ulterior motives for calling them after having been out of touch for a few years. I chose not to take offense, realizing there may come a time when I actually do need something from these budding investment bankers — like one of those hot stock tips that never make their way to Washington.
I wasn’t in Cambridge long enough to know whether I would like business school, but there’s one book I’d recommend to anyone who thinks about applying: Harvard calls it “The Prospectus,” but it’s better known as “The Facebook.” I was handed a copy soon after arriving, and careful scrutiny of its contents proved enlightening. For not only does the book include the name and photo of everyone in the class — handy for the vast majority of students who are unmarried — it also contains a set of appendices that greatly facilitate the primary mission of so many HBS students: networking. Say you meet a classmate at a party, and you can’t remember her name, but you conveniently remember that she once worked at McKinsey. You look up “McKinsey” in the appropriate appendix, where there will be a list of all your classmates who have worked there, and then — presto! — you cross-reference this list with the photos. If they had had such a book at Georgetown and Yale, just think how Bill Clinton’s student electioneering would have been simplified.
The Facebook contains appendices for country or state of origin, languages spoken, undergraduate university, and course of study as well as places of employment. I flyspecked the backgrounds of the 650 first-year students in hopes of finding someone with a background similar to mine. I was lucky to turn up even one. My first job after college was in Washington, D.C., making $ 17,500 at the New Republic. The HBSers, by contrast, all seemed to come from New York or London, where they made three or four times that much working for outfits so deep in the business of making money — Lazard Freres, J.P. Morgan, Brown Brothers Harriman — they don’t bother setting up shop in a non-money town like Washington.
This seemed to confirm my suspicion that I wasn’t really suited for business school (at least not at Harvard). My paranoid side wondered about the ideological environment, as I’ve had too many friends tell horror stories about their encounters with tenured radicals. Harvard has never been known as a bastion of conservatism — right-wingers tend to deride it as “the Kremlin on the Charles” — and I guessed the business school would be populated by temporarily radicalized students trying to compensate for studying a subject as heartless as how to maximize profits.
Indeed, the business school is far from immune to political correctness. The spouses of married students are officially “partners,” and there are the inevitable identitybased groups for gays, blacks, and Asians. But the existence of a Venture Capital Club was a clue that this environment was markedly different from the one I experienced as an undergraduate at Wesleyan. Indeed, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there is a grudging acceptance within the business school that — to put it simply — the market works, and it works better than the clumsy hand of government.
I asked a few students to explain why they thought capitalism was the preferred way of doing business, but only one came up with a satisfactory answer. He explained that after graduating from college, he had spent three years at Morgan Stanley and one year doing community service in Costa Rica. After two years at HBS, he’d concluded he could do much more long-term good for poor Latin Americans by privatizing their telephone system in an investment-banking deal than he could digging latrines in their barrios. That’s the kind of story that warms the heart of an ideologue such as myself. But it still doesn’t make me want to go to business school.
MATTHEW REES
