It’s hard not to think about the ramifications of a government-run education system when there are weekly reports about the impending implosion of the student loan industry. At over $1.4 trillion dollars, that’s larger than both US automotive loan balances and household credit card debt!
There’s obviously something awry with the way the system is set up, but we’re not here to debate that. What we are here to do is demonstrate that the same rigor of thinking that has created the student loan bubble also shares responsibility for the failure of brick and mortar.
In America, the US Department of Education (USDE) recognizes colleges that have been accredited. Accreditation is performed by third parties, but those parties are approved by the USDE (and another government body). The reason accreditation matters boils down to this:
Institutions without USDE recognition cannot offer federal aid to students, and credits from non-USDE-recognized schools may not transfer to other schools. Also, savvy employers may dismiss or devalue the credits and degrees from such schools.
But what if accredited college programs are not teaching real-world skills? That someone graduating from an accredited program is not sufficiently prepared to be useful? Does this set employees and employees up for failure? All we need to do is look at brick and mortar for our answer.
For starters, we’re going to need to be more specific. We looked at the most highly rated hospitality schools to start our analysis and found that Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration is rated number one. On Cornell’s own website it touts its accreditation.
As the only stand-alone hospitality program to earn AACSB accreditation and the only hospitality program in the Ivy League, SHA prepares students to flourish in whatever business or leadership roles they seek—or create.
This must mean it’s good, right?
Well, we couldn’t tell. We combed through Cornell’s undergraduate curriculum to see what students would be learning. We were particularly interested in the below topics since these are going to be the main drivers of future merchant performance:
When we didn’t see anything to this level of specificity we jumped on the phone with Cathy Enz, the Associate Dean of Student Affairs at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration (CSHA). What she shared with us was rather surprising.
50% of CSHA’s undergraduate degree is made up of business fundamentals. These are your classes on economics, statistics, and operations research. The remaining 50% are up to the students and dependent on their specific path within the program. A student focusing on food and beverage or restaurants would take different classes than someone focusing on hotel management.
We asked where our topics of interest were covered then, as some of these were patently relevant to any of their graduates; machine learning is impacting everything, so is that being discussed?
Each faculty chooses the particular trends or items to cover. I believe more advanced statistics and machine learning would be covered in our Operations Research fundamental classes and A/B testing is covered in consumer behavior courses. But it’s very important that students are educated by research-centric faculty with deeper theoretical understanding.
Research and theory are great, but in the real world people must earn profits and be held accountable. Tenure doesn’t exist. So we asked if students were getting these topics in practical applications.
“Students are exposed to real world applications a number of ways. There’s a guest lecture series that brings in private industry experts, and there’s also a round table for faculty and private industry.” In the latter case students are exposed to real world concepts only in a second-hand fashion, however.
It was then that Dr. Enz made the most interesting and unexpected comment.
Most of our students who pursue the restaurant path are more interested in being entrepreneurs than operators. A good number of them find minors in computer science and leverage what they know about the restaurant industry to build products and services for them.
Let us decode this for you.
Many people end up in the restaurant business because they have difficulty finding work elsewhere. Whereas many industries mandate a certain minimum ability to reach increasing positions, people in the restaurant industry can survive by attrition: the fry cook has been around so long that, hey, let’s just make them CEO!
It is difficult to learn from people who have “earned” their roles this way, but it is not difficult to understand their work-related struggles, mostly of their own doing. Thus it sounds like many of Cornell’s students have figured this out before graduation, and would much rather fix the merchant’s problems rather than suffer under an incompetent superior. Can you blame really them?
That doesn’t give academia a pass. Yes, Cornell’s students seem to be working in the restaurant business without working at a merchant, but there are many other programs – particularly from the chef training – that are obviously under-preparing their graduates for the real world. News flash: if 30% of your business revenues come from a third party that takes 20%+ commission fees, you are going to struggle to stay afloat no matter how well you souffle.
These programs need to do a much better job turning out capable business owners. Yes, some people end up in the restaurant industry because they can’t work anywhere else. But those that pay to learn the trade? At least give them something for their money.
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