Every September, roughly 250,000 people across the world start an MBA. Most of them are likely to have worked incredibly hard to get there.

To have any chance of being accepted, you’ll need at least five years of managerial experience, sit a two-hour entrance exam after months of revision, fill in a lengthy application form, write two to three essays, get several references, and attend at least one interview.

After all of that, most people get rejected. The Wharton School received over 7,000 applications in 2023 and turned away 80 percent. Stanford and Harvard have an acceptance rate of less than 10 percent.

The point being, anyone who has made it through that onerous application process is likely to be intelligent. So, you would think that those 250,000 undoubtedly smart people go on to do some amazing things. Maybe they begin solving some of the great challenges of our time. Start businesses that provide secure, well-paid work for people. Affect real change that will benefit society as a whole.

Some of them will. Most, however, will not. Around two-thirds of MBA students will end up in consulting or finance; two industries with sky-high salaries but questionable track records when it comes to societal change. The ‘controversies’ section of the Wikipedia page for one exceptionally well-known consulting firm comes in at almost 4,000 words. The same section for a global bank is so long that it was split into separate decades.

Salary is an obvious attraction for these workplaces, particularly as students look to maximise the return on investment of their already expensive MBA education. But all in all, is it an issue that scores of highly intelligent graduates end up in one of two industries, rather than benefitting more sectors?

"What you define as useful or useless is probably going to be contested by a lot of people,” chuckles Martin Parker, a Professor of Organisation Studies at the University of Bristol Business School in the UK. “I might well say that the activities of graduates working in City of London finance don't add much to the sum of human happiness - but I'm sure those finance firms would put up a principled defence of whatever it is they get up to in those glassy towers."

Useless or not, Professor Parker questions how those careers benefit society. "Business schools are very often generating graduates who end up in occupations that are not going to be good for us or the planet.”

At first, it might seem counterintuitive that a business school professor is so critical of the business school experience. But Professor Parker argues that most business schools don’t actually teach business. They teach capitalism. At Bristol, he teaches alternative forms of business.

“Other economic models are available, but they don't teach those. So, we don't learn about collective ownership or zero-carbon businesses or co-ops. And this isn't some sort of wild hippy dream. These are actually working forms of business that don't rely on markets and capitalism. But you wouldn't know that if you went to most business schools."

Though Professor Parker acknowledges that business schools are starting to teach alternative ways of doing business (including religion-based methods, as covered in Issue 26, February 2025 and Issue 27, March 2025), he says that change is happening ‘very slowly and around the edges.’

However, MBA admissions consultant Oren Margolis believes that business schools have changed considerably in recent years. "I actually think these programmes have seen a pretty huge culture change in terms of the way they think about business,” he argues.

“Basically, any class is now going to be taught through the lens of increasing profits and revenue, but also impacting sustainability and social responsibility. I'm sure if you looked at the numbers of students concentrating in these areas over the last 10 years or so, it'd be a straight line up. That to me does represent a culture shift."

Professor Parker and Margolis don’t agree on where business schools stand, but they do agree that students are interested in things like sustainability and social impact. "When I talk to students about this, most of them are ready to be convinced,” says Professor Parker. For Margolis, “Millennials and especially Gen Z care very, very deeply [about these issues]. And they're demanding about the programmes that they enter.”

Still, there seems to be a disconnect between the values of these graduates and the actual careers they end up in. “Whether that is the fault of business schools, I don't know,” says Professor Parker. “I do think that we can intervene in business schools to change that, and that many business schools actively sell the idea of a 'business lifestyle' in which you will be able to put a Porsche on the drive and get keys to the executive washroom. That's part of their marketing."

But some schools are doing things differently. Amy Major is the MBA Programme Director at Oxford Saïd Business School. She explains that because Saïd is a relatively young business school - it was only founded in 1990 - it has always been more open to social impact and sustainability than other schools.

"Our core number of people going into social impact jobs will be higher than the average business school that we're compared to,” she says. “And what we're doing across the board is creating a strong thread of graduates who want to create a greater purpose in the world than just a financial return on investment."

At Saïd, around 15-20 percent of MBA electives are centred around social impact or sustainability, though it’s a thread that runs through all their modules. And that shows in their employment statistics. Just over 11 percent of the class of 2023 went into impact roles, while another 10 percent started their own business. In comparison, 1.3 percent of Columbia Business School grads went into the impact sector and 2.8 percent started their own business.

For Major, the equation is quite simple. "If we take the view that business schools will be producing the next generation of business leaders, we need to have people who care about the world and what we're leaving behind for future generations. So, I think that business schools have a responsibility to produce responsible leaders."

Across the Atlantic, things are also starting to change. The American University is the largest higher education institution in the United States to have achieved carbon neutrality, and took the decision four years ago to totally revamp its messaging around sustainability. Now, its Kogod School of Business focuses on social impact and sustainability over profit and revenue.

"As things have changed in the last five to 10 years in terms of social impact and sustainability, we have become more aware that we needed to make sure that our students were prepared,” explains Cynthia O'Brien, the school’s Executive Director for Career, Alumni and Industry Engagement. "The core of what we do at Kogod is that we want to build a better world through sustainability. So, it's embedded into our curriculum."

All core courses in the Kogod MBA incorporate some kind of sustainability content, whilst a capstone project at the end of the programme is focused on sustainable business strategy. Recent projects include strategising for an electric vehicle charging company, advancing fair labour practices and social sustainability legislation, and innovating for a sustainable textile company.

It all seems a world away from those glassy towers of the major finance firms. But schools like Saïd and Kogod are showing that it is possible for students to get high salaries and high fulfilment from their careers. Extrapolate that kind of approach to business schools as a whole, and society would surely benefit.

Of course, that’s easier said than done.

"Students are presented with an extraordinarily expensive university experience,” says Professor Parker, “and so it's not surprising that many of those people would want to head towards occupations that they regard as highly paid and secure.

"What we should instead be asking is: why are we incentivising those occupations and not others? Why do you get paid so much better for doing bad stuff than you do for good stuff? We need to think about those kinds of questions instead of blaming business school graduates for being attracted to the dark side."

So, what’s the solution?

One could be better incentives for business school students. More business schools could educate students about alternative forms of business and more impactful career paths. High-impact (but lower paying) jobs could be subsidised by governments or business schools. Scholarships could be awarded to impact-makers instead of high-achievers. Student loans could even be written off if somebody goes into an industry like sustainability or not-for-profit, or starts their own business.

Clearly there’s no simple solution here. But by starting to change the culture of business schools, we can also change the idea of the no-impact MBA. For wider society, it feels like that can only be a good thing.