Schools for scoundrels
Filed in archive corporate crime by leon on September 27, 2006
That seems to be the finding of a new study which has found that B-school students are more likely to cheat than students in other graduate programs. The researchers found that 56 per cent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year year, compared with 47 per cent of non-business students.
The survey, carried out by Pennsylvania State, Rutgers and Washington State universities, covered 5,331 students at 32 graduate business schools in the U.S. and Canada.
Now, assuming it's not just a case of business students being more upfront about their dishonesty than their non-business peers, it might say something about the kind of person attracted to business education in the first place. They might be more results-focused, which could drive their willingness to cheat.
The more interesting question is what it says about business in general.
It means that if you think the average corporate chief is a lying thief, you ain't seen nothin' yet, says Matthew Lynn at Bloomberg.
Why is this happening? As David Callahan, a co-founder of the New York-based think tank Demos told Lynn: "There is little social sanction for cheating when so many people are cheating that it becomes normal and routine. When everybody's doing it, you don't feel bad if you do it, too."
As Lynn says, part of the problem might be that business has developed a "win-at-all-costs culture" that tacitly, and sometimes not so tacitly, encourages rule-breaking.
If everyone else is doing it, the message going out is that it's acceptable. And from there, it's just another step away from cooking the books or lying in your filings.
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