Eugene David
...The One-Minute Pundit

Thursday, January 19, 2006


Let's connect some dots:

MBAs are hot, again....

The $106,000 salary and signing bonus was up 13.5% from 2004, according to a GMAC survey of 5,829 2005 grads. Salary alone increased to $88,600, surpassing the previous high of $85,400 set in 2001. The 2005 salary still trails 2001 by about $4,000 when adjusted for inflation, but the inflation-adjusted record will likely be broken this year.

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Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.

Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers.

More than 50% of students at four-year schools and more than 75% at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks.

That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.


Okay, the MBAs aren't quite the same as the four-year gang. Then again they had to get their high-toned Babbitty degrees somewhere, and no doubt in the course of their super-fast progressions up the corporate ladder (which often end in a do-nothing middle rung) they take their college-educated philistinism with them, so that while the average uneducated college student may only have trouble with charts and editorials, the super-duper gee-whiz Babbitt has a chance of implementing his philistinism. Every day sees a new abuse of the public by corporate America, an abuse impossible without the MBA's unappetizing blend of superegoism and uneducation -- and corporate America is as rife with fraud as with MBAs. The academic-industrial complex can't teach, and in a business with its own caste system it can't teach in different ways.

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