Is Michigan State Really Better Than Yale?
耶鲁大学管理学院瞄准哈佛

During the M.B.A. gold rush of the past three decades, the Yale School of Management accomplished the unthinkable. As the number of prospective business-school candidates shot up to more than 750,000 a year and tuition payments cleared $100,000, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Chicago and other schools hired star faculty members, built gleaming buildings, established themselves as global brands and brought in tens (and sometimes hundreds) of millions in profits to their universities each year. Meanwhile, Yale somehow lost money.

在过去30年的M.B.A.(工商管理硕士)“淘金热”中，耶鲁大学管理学院(Yale School of Management)完成了一项难以想象的事情。随着计划申请商学院的人数猛增到每年超过75万人，而每年的学费也超过了10万美元大关，哈佛(Harvard)、斯坦福(Stanford)、芝加哥大学(University of Chicago)等学校的商学院请来了明星教授，建起了明亮的教学楼，树立起国际品牌，并且为大学吸收到每年几千万（甚至上亿）美元的收入。然而在这场“淘金热”中，耶鲁大学竟然赔了钱。

Specifically, Yale “lost $15 to $20 million over the last 15 years,” says Edward Snyder, the new dean of the Yale School of Management. It remained small (400 students), maintained an unusually low student-to-faculty ratio of 8 to 1 (most top schools are closer to 20 to 1) and offered only limited versions of some of its industry’s most lucrative products (like part-time and executive M.B.A.’s). Most significantly it developed a reputation as a bastion of socially minded do-gooders who were less focused on maximizing profit. According to Bloomberg Businessweek’s latest rankings of the top M.B.A. programs, Yale placed 21st, right behind Michigan State.

耶鲁管理学院的新任院长爱德华·斯奈德(Edward Snyder)介绍，确切地说，耶鲁“在过去的15年中，赔了1500万到2000万美元”。耶鲁商学院在这些年里保持着比较小的规模（共有400名学生），维持着1:8的超高的师生比（多数顶级商学院的师生比都接近1:20），并且只开设少量商学院最常用来挣钱的项目（比如在职M.B.A.和E.M.B.A.）。最重要的是，这个学院是作为“有社会责任感，不求利益最大化的好人的堡垒”而为人所知。据《彭博商业周刊》(Bloomberg Businessweek)的最新M.B.A.项目排名，耶鲁位列第21位，列居密歇根州立大学(Michigan State)之后。

Snyder has become the top hired gun in the business of business schools. An academic economist by trade, he built his reputation through successful stints as a deputy dean at the University of Michigan and dean at the University of Virginia. Snyder then turned the University of Chicago business school into the top-rated program in the country. In 2008, he reeled in a $300 million donation from David Booth, a hedge-fund manager and alumnus. It was the school’s largest gift ever and enough to change the name to Chicago Booth. Now he’s hoping to pull off a similar turnaround at Yale. That will almost certainly require shedding its do-gooder reputation.

在商学院这场看不见硝烟的战役，斯奈德是一名出色的狙击手。作为一名职业经济学学者，他在担任密歇根大学商学院副院长以及弗吉尼亚大学(University of Virginia)商学院院长期间，渐渐树立起了自己的声名。接着，斯奈德把芝加哥大学的商学院变成了全国最好的商学院之一。2008年，他从对冲基金经理，同时也是芝加哥大学校友的大卫·布斯(David Booth)那里要到了3亿捐款。这是芝大商学院有史以来获得的最大一笔捐款，它足以让学院的名字变成“芝加哥·布斯”。现在，斯奈德希望给耶鲁带来同样的华丽转身，但这几乎肯定要有损它的“好人堡垒”的名声。

Successful business schools have become major businesses themselves, but as I spoke to Snyder, I realized that the ones that bring in the most money might be doing the least for the global economy. It wasn’t always this way. In the early 1950s, my grandfather paid around $800 a year to attend Harvard Business School. The course work gave him some practical skills that helped him move up from assistant foreman to full foreman at the same machine-tool company. These days, though, the value of your M.B.A. is as much symbolic as practical. With increased global competition, the real money is in résumé polishing and status, not supply-chain management. Harvard Business School now costs about $120,000, which, after taking into account room and board and two years of lost wages, comes to around $400,000 in real cost. This year, more than 10,000 people applied for fewer than 900 slots.

商学院的经营已经发展为一门重要的生意。但是当我跟斯奈德对话的时候，我意识到那些最挣钱的商学院和商科项目可能是对全球经济最没用的。这种局面以前并不存在。20世纪50年代初，我祖父花800美元一年去上哈佛商学院。那些课程教给他一些实用的技巧，从而让他从机床厂的助理管工升职为总管工。但是今天，拥有一纸M.B.A.文凭，象征价值与实用性摆在了同样重要的地位。在日益激烈的国际竞争中，值钱的是一份漂亮的简历和较高的学历，而不是供应链管理的技巧。现在，读一个哈佛商学院的学位要12万美元，再加上住宿费用和这两年放弃的工资，大概总共要花40万美元。而今年，超过1万人在争夺不足900个招生名额。

Harvard and the other top schools can charge their students (or customers, really) a huge markup for the same reason that Nike or Apple can. This leaves the hundreds of lower-tier business schools competing as something of an undifferentiated mass. These commodity-level players, like the Ourso College of Business at Louisiana State University, are effectively stuck with the increasingly difficult task of trying to distinguish themselves.

哈佛和其他顶级高校可以从它们的学生（或者实际就是消费者）身上获取高额利润的理由和耐克(Nike)、苹果(Apple)这些品牌是一样的。这就让剩下成百上千的排名较后的商学院走进了一个梯队，彼此间大同小异。这些跟日用品一样平庸的竞争者——比如路易斯安那州立大学的奥尔索商学院(Ourso College of Business at Louisiana State University)——越来越难以建立自己的辨识度。

It is important to remember, though, that the basic tools of business are commodities. There are countless courses, books and on-the-job programs that teach the proper rules of accounting, the best practices for developing strategy and the key components of a business plan. Harvard’s basic accounting course might be a bit better than, say, the University of Wisconsin’s, but is it so much better as to justify three times the price?

但需要注意的是，贸易的基础是产品。现在有无数的课程、课本和在职培训来教授会计学的规则、发展战略的最优实现形式以及经营计划的关键构成。哈佛的会计学基础课可能会比其他大学，比方说威斯康辛大学(University of Wisconsin)的稍微好一点，但是这一点优势足以使其三倍的学费具有合理性吗？

Placing a value on intangibles is inherently squishy, but the Bloomberg Businessweek rankings have tried to cut through the murkiness by ranking the top M.B.A. programs two ways. Its prestige-and-overall-quality ranking garners the expected results (Chicago, Harvard, Stanford, and so forth). But its best-value-for-money calculation, which ranks the schools based on a ratio of debt and earnings for recent graduates, finds that the costs of the top-flight schools eat away most of their value. Graduates of elite business schools, the survey found, make an average salary of $160,000 one year out of school. In 20 years, they averaged around $200,000 a year. That’s a lot of money, but probably nowhere near what many were expecting. Graduates were also likely to be heavily in debt and trying to get by in expensive cities. On the other hand, graduates of Ourso at L.S.U., the poll’s top-ranked value school, earned about $60,000 a year on average, but they were more likely to live in lower-cost regions and less likely to be in debt.

虽然为无形的东西赋值是一件不太靠谱的事情，但是《彭博商业周刊》还是试图用两种方法来进行M.B.A.排名，以尽量减少排名的随意性。 它的“声望与整体质量排名”的结果和我们预想的一样（就是芝加哥大学、哈佛、斯坦福等大学依次排列）。但是它的“最佳性价比排名”——基于学校近几届毕业生的负债和收入之比的排名——发现，顶级商学院的高收费基本抵消了它的价值。调查发现，那些顶级商学院的学生毕业后平均年薪是16万美元。毕业20年以后，他们可以达到平均年薪20万美元。这是个不低的收入，但也许跟很多人预期的还差得远。另外，这些顶级商学院毕业生更有可能欠银行一屁股债，而且要设法在物价很高的城市里生存。而与此同时，在“最佳性价比排名”中名列前茅的路易斯安那州立大学奥尔索商学院的毕业生平均每年可以收入6万美元，但是他们更有可能生活在物价较低的地区，贷款也比较少。

Snyder’s growth plan for Yale is certainly not to offer the best value for money. He sees Yale as the one second-tier school with a real shot at making it to the top. But as I sat in Snyder’s large office in an old mansion in New Haven, I felt the need to admit that I’m rooting against him (sort of). Commoditized business education might not be prestigious, but it could produce extraordinary economic change. Some of the less elite schools, like the University of California, Irvine, are already offering free online courses in business fundamentals. Distributed digital education is still in its infancy, but it’s easy to imagine that all sorts of educational tools will eventually be offered online or, better, on the inexpensive mobile phones that are all over the developing world.

斯奈德给耶鲁制定的发展计划显然不包括提供性价比最佳的项目。他认为耶鲁管理学院是一个可以够上一流的二流商学院。但当我在他位于纽黑文的古老建筑的大办公室里和他面对面的时候，我觉得我得跟他唱反调（算是吧）。平民化的商科教育可能听起来不那么炫，但是它可以带来经济上非同寻常的改变。一些没有那么高端的学校，比如加州大学欧文分校（或称尔湾分校，University of California, Irvine），已经在提供免费的在线商科基础课程了。电子化远程教学目前还处于初始阶段，但是我们很容易想象得到，各种各样的教学工具最终都会被搭载在互联网上——或者更理想的话，可以搭载在发展中世界里最为普及的廉价手机上。

The most disruptive development in the business world right now is that billions of people in China, India, Latin America, Africa and elsewhere have joined the world’s market economies. There are hundreds of millions of small farmers, shopkeepers and potential entrepreneurs for whom mass business-educational tools could be transformational in ways that make a handful of top schools seem utterly irrelevant. While reporting in Haiti once, I met Yvrose Jean Baptiste, a microentrepreneur who made a meager living by buying groceries on the Dominican border and taking them, by bus, to Port-au-Prince to sell for a few pennies of profit. After spending a few days with Baptiste, I found it obvious that she had a sharp business instinct. The idea of giving her — and millions like her — a basic business education seems much more economically important than helping a tiny group of ambitious overachievers pay a fortune for a degree that seems more about helping people get a job than preparing them to do it.

当前世界贸易格局中最具有突破性的发展就是来自中国、印度、拉美、非洲等地方的几十亿人开始加入到全球市场经济当中，这中间包括上亿的小农、小个体户还有潜在的企业家。对于他们，大众的商科教育可能会带来革命性的改变，相比之下，顶级商学院的效果简直无关痛痒。一次去海地采访，我认识了小生意人伊芙罗斯·珍·巴普拉斯特(Yvrose Jean Baptiste)。她从海地和多米尼加边境批发杂货，然后搭公交车到太子港把货转卖出去，这样赚点小钱来艰难地维持生计。跟巴普拉斯特在一起待了几天之后，我发现她显然具有敏锐的生意头脑。我认为，给她和几百万像她那样的人提供基本的商科教育，比起给那一小撮野心勃勃的优等生提供奖学金读一个学位有意义多了。毕竟，一个顶级商学院的学位只能给人们在求职的时候锦上添花，它不能让人真正胜任一份工作。

Snyder surprised me by saying that he agrees (sort of). Offering commoditized business-education technology can help the world’s poor. But, he said, elite multinationals face unique problems that require elite training. He recently returned from China, where almost all of the nation’s 73 Fortune 500 companies are in commodities businesses. Elite schools, he said, need to teach skills that can help China move beyond commodities and create global brands. “Who is going to solve that?” he asked. “It takes pretty big insights and big execution. There’s a role for the top business schools in solving problems like that.”

让我惊讶的是，斯奈德表示同意我的观点（算是吧）。提供平民化的商科教学工具确实可以帮助世界各地的穷人。但是他说，那些跨国精英们面临的特殊问题需要精英化的培训。斯奈德最近刚从中国回来。中国有73家财富500强公司，这些公司几乎全部从事制造业。而他认为，精英学校需要向中国的企业家传授跨越廉价制造业时代、打造国际品牌的技巧。“这种问题应该由谁来解决呢？”他问道：“这需要敏锐的洞察力和高水平的执行力。一流的商学院就应该来解决这样的问题。”

As I left Snyder’s office and walked out into Yale’s verdant campus, I remembered that he has his own global brand to worry about. Yale, unlike the commodity programs, can’t offer all of its classes free and build its prestige. High-end and mass business education probably will continue to exist side by side, but the question is what their relationship will be. High-end restaurants were once an elitist pleasure, but they undoubtedly influenced the organic foods that we now buy everywhere, from supermarkets to fast-food chains and lunch trucks. In the food industry, unlike many luxury-goods businesses, the high- and low-end businesses have conspired to offer the best possible stuff to the masses. It would make a great business-school case study.

当我离开斯奈德的办公室，走进耶鲁郁郁葱葱的校园时，我想到他也需要考虑他自己的国际品牌。和那些大众化的项目不同的是，耶鲁的商科教育不能靠免费开放所有课程来打造它的声望。高端的商科教育和平民化的商科教育也许还会肩并肩地共存，但问题在于它们的关系应该是什么样的。高端的餐厅曾经是只属于精英阶层的享受，但它们无疑也对有机食品的生产产生了影响，现在从超市到快餐连锁店和流动商贩那里都能买到这些食品。食品产业不同于奢饰品产业的特点在于，在食品业，从高端到低端的企业在合力为大众提供最好的产品。这个行业应该可以成为商学院学习的一个不错的案例。

BEAT HARVARD

击败哈佛

This being business school, Edward Snyder, the new dean of the Yale School of Management, has a five-step plan for how to turn any middling institution into a leader in the field.

作为商学院的教授，耶鲁管理学院的新任院长爱德华·斯奈德拥有一套可以让任何中流商学院跃居第一梯队的“五步计划”。

1. Start by focusing on the sectors where the school has strong relationships and build from there. Or, as Snyder says, ‘‘Give up the undifferentiated, multi-brass-ring strategy of best recruiters, best students, best facilities, blah, blah, blah.’’

1.从学院实力最强的点上着手，进行学院建设。用斯奈德的话来说：“放弃那些没有个性的、十全大补的战略吧，比如什么要最好的招生人员、最好的学生、最好的设施，诸如此类。”

2. Embrace a mix of faculty, particularly those with real-world experience. ‘‘You’ll still want some strong, fast-ball-discipline types in areas like economics, finance and psychology to teach how markets work and function,’’ Snyder says. ‘‘But get fewer of them.’’

2.招募更多元化的教职人员，尤其是那种有一手经验的。“要找一些态度强势、脑子活络的人来教经济、金融和心理学这些课，讲一讲市场到底是怎么运作的。”斯奈德说：“不过这种人也不宜太多。”

3. Calculate the cost of things — any things! ‘‘Be very focused on and systematic about collecting data and sharing data with other schools around the country and the world,’’ he says. ‘‘Collect data on industries and on markets. It’s really valuable for students to do that, and you’ll make your school valuable for insight and information.’’ Extra credit: ‘‘It’s good for branding.’’

3.所有花销都要精打细算！“在收集数据和与国内外其他学校分享数据上，你需要非常专注，非常系统化，”他说：“要收集行业和市场上的数据。让学生们做这些事情非常有意义，而且学院会在洞见和信息占有这两方面拥有独特的价值。”额外的好处就是：“这对打造品牌很有利。”

4. Offer a broader mix of programs, including part-time ones. ‘‘That’s more affordable in today’s economy and where the market at business schools is going.’’

4.提供更多种类的项目，包括给在职人员的项目。“在今天的经济气候下，这比全职项目更容易让学生负担得起，所以也是商学院的市场开发的方向。”

5. Book your ticket to Gdansk! ‘‘If you’re going to be global, be selective and try to identify a less well served country like Vietnam or Poland instead of China. Pick places with young populations that don’t already have a lot of business schools.’’