I agree that there's little offered in those 2 areas in most business programs. Most juicy courses are offered at the graduate level, which is why I'd only recommend business school in undergraduate if the business side of skills is giving you a really hard time.
There are however severak courses that I'd give a shot out of the list Sloan makes public.
Sytem Optimization
Network Optimization
Early Stage Capital
Finance I&II
System Dynamics
A whole slew of Accountig & Law Courses
As you can notice, I left out anything marketing related, current affairs related anything industry specific and anything ethics related.
It's not that I think those are useless, because I agree with you. Business school marketing will teach how to talk about marketing, but not how to do marketing. Current trends are better analyzed by yourself, and industry specific knowledge should be gained directly from the source. Go talk to some people who are in that industry. And if you don't have personal ethics, business ethics isn't going to help you, and if you do have them, business ethics is not going to teach you anything beyond what you have.
Business school covers a fraction of doing business, so you have to supplement it with other sources of knowledge (Marketing? Get your fingers dirty with PPC. Salesmanship? Sell vacuums over your summer break). But if you have most of your trouble with that fraction, get help with it even if it's just formally learning the stuff.
So business school has limited utility, which should not be simply discounted.
And yes, you can study everything on your own. But then why go to college at all?
At the undergraduate level, I feel like you would cover those things and more by going the industrial engineering route and supplementing with accounting classes.
Don't get me wrong--I think those core accounting and finance classes are very important. I personally wish I had taken some more of them while I was in law school (we had them cross-registered with Kellogg), because it's relly valuable, broadly applicable stuff for anyone running a business or dealing with business clients. But a) you can self-teach that stuff as easily as you can self-teach engineering; and b) that stuff is a necessary but not sufficient subset of skills you need to be a great manager and leader.
That's my biggest beef with business school, especially at the undergraduate level. I think a good engineering school serves as a reliable indicator that someone can do the work. But with an MBA, you need to do more to see if the person has more than the corporate finance and accounting skills they learned in school.
There are however severak courses that I'd give a shot out of the list Sloan makes public. Sytem Optimization Network Optimization Early Stage Capital Finance I&II System Dynamics A whole slew of Accountig & Law Courses
As you can notice, I left out anything marketing related, current affairs related anything industry specific and anything ethics related.
It's not that I think those are useless, because I agree with you. Business school marketing will teach how to talk about marketing, but not how to do marketing. Current trends are better analyzed by yourself, and industry specific knowledge should be gained directly from the source. Go talk to some people who are in that industry. And if you don't have personal ethics, business ethics isn't going to help you, and if you do have them, business ethics is not going to teach you anything beyond what you have.
Business school covers a fraction of doing business, so you have to supplement it with other sources of knowledge (Marketing? Get your fingers dirty with PPC. Salesmanship? Sell vacuums over your summer break). But if you have most of your trouble with that fraction, get help with it even if it's just formally learning the stuff.
So business school has limited utility, which should not be simply discounted.
And yes, you can study everything on your own. But then why go to college at all?