The Social Transformation of Executive Education in American Schools of Management: Pursuing the Public Good and Escaping Educational Returns on Investment (EROI)

Abstract

This research analyzes a multibillion-dollar university industry’s strategic origins and tactical liability. Executive education stalled under recent pandemic lockdowns, leaving few clues as to how it arrived in an obscure position capable of financially devastating the entire university. Counterintuitively, the dissertation discovers data establishing executive education’s historical trajectory as a struggle to define an existence beyond making money with noble but ephemeral public purposes. It took the Great Depression, WWII, and a postwar GI Boom before Ken Andrews, a prestigious academic entrepreneur, rationalized executive education’s means to an end as an institution. The end was problem solving the role of corporations in society. The means was exercising the university’s sovereign authority over corporations to broaden executive minds into thinking like policymakers about the public good.

The dissertation is an institutional history examining executive education’s false start, rise from creation to diffusion, and social transformation under the auspices of Andrews. Three eras depict wild fluctuations in rhetoric loosely coupling core business education disciplines to executive program purposes until an academic entrepreneur rationalized the myth of their social rather than economic relevance. Depression Era executive education applied core academic knowledge to ambitious but social purposes in a decade of crisis. The traditional core MBA decomposed into executive programs in WWII production. After the war, these programs were recomposed into general management executive education. However, these programs lacked a compelling purpose coupling to the core MBA but were backed by corporations seeking an educational return on investment (EROI) for tuition. A prestigious academic entrepreneur named Ken Andrews entered the third era from the 1950s to 1970 and temporarily resolved conflict over programs by legitimizing executive education’s purpose as teaching corporate policymaking to help society and deeming the EROI indeterminate.

The dissertation’s main argument is that the entrepreneur activated an echo chamber of external judgements surrounding business schools to redefine executive education as a preemptive defense mechanism against corporate pressures over campus. His echo chamber was an assembly of semiprofessional journaling, philanthropic foundation reporting, and book publishing. The defense mechanism deflected EROI evaluation, fortified tuition, and asserted policymaking for the public good. First, it diminished corporate pressures by rendering EROI evaluation indeterminate. Second, it permitted charging high margin tuition to executives as proper to cross subsidize campuses. Third, it asserted academic control over corporations to teach policymaking with a social purpose. Andrews’ triple defense legitimized executive education before the 1970s by pausing the EROI, deterring corporate pressures, and reversing the direction of control to promote policymaking for the public good.

Original primary sources address six schools: Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Wharton, MIT, and NYU. These archival data are substantiated by secondary sources on additional schools.