believes differs from a Masters which equips students with more specialist knowledge.


Simon Stockley, Director of the full-time MBA Programmes at Imperial College Business School, London, agrees: “The Masters in Finance is a more quantitative degree featuring a lot of pure maths to equip graduates for corporate finance and investment banking jobs.


“It’s a direct response to requests we have from the city. Virtually all


of these graduates get careers in financial institutions.”


Trained Incapacity: The Rise of Specialized Masters Degrees


“A generalist species is able


to thrive in a wide variety of environmental conditions and can make use of a variety of different resources. A specialist species can only survive in a narrow range of environmental conditions.”


When I was president of the University of Cincinnati in the 1970s, the dean of the medical school poignantly remarked that the only generalist he could find at the hospital or in the faculty was the patient. That irony has come to mind frequently in the past year or so when I learned that 60 percent of U.S. MBA programs reported a decline in applications. At the same time, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, “the market for specialized Masters programs in accounting, management,


finance, and a number of other business disciplines has never been stronger.” Deborah MacInnis, a vice dean at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, has been concerned about these specialized degrees and alerted me that for the last five years or so, B-schools have received a growing number of applications for these programs. And many of them seem alarmingly esoteric or vocational such as smart grids, luxury management, fluid dynamics, hospitality,insurance, and retail.


It’s not the esoterica or the “trade school” emphases that concern me. It’s the specialization. The original and brilliant idea of an MBA was the opportunity for students to study the theory


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