By Robert Pembroke
My wife recently attended a seminar put on by University of Utah Health Sciences, where she heard Ruth Watkins, senior vice president of the university, talk about the school. Watkins told the group that the University of Utah has one of the lowest student loan loads of any university in the nation.
The same day I went up to the David Eccles School of Business and chatted with Amanda Miller, an academic advisor for Undergraduate Advising Services, about whether or not they were teaching their students how to sell. The night before, my grandson, who is attending the College of Business, told me that he hadn’t seen any classes that taught sales. Miller showed me that there was a whole track in marketing that taught students how to sell.
If you have followed my columns, I have occasionally opined about how colleges are failing to provide adequate education to our children and loading them up with student debt. Yes, now I have egg on my face — but only when it comes to the University of Utah.
Both grandsons, at a family dinner, showed interest in getting an MBA. This instantly raised my blood pressure to an unhealthy plateau. I have never thought an MBA was worth the money. There are 6 million small-business owners out there that employ a majority of the workers in our nation. I did not need an MBA to successfully run our small business.
I have now noticed that a number of colleges are dropping their MBA programs because of lack of interest. Let’s take a look at what happened at Wake Forest. After five years of declining enrollment, the school dropped its MBA program in 2015. Yes, Wake Forest finally realized that it had better start to deliver a product that made economic sense to students.
This also allowed employers to keep full-time, talented employees who wanted to expand their educational needs. The university expanded its evening and weekend classes and increased the ways that students can access them by offering e-learning. One key point was that the university said it must maintain face-to-face interaction.
The University of Iowa is also phasing out its MBA program over the next few years and instead, is offering several professional certificates. Iowa does offer an MBA degree in accounting and is looking at adding a degree in finance. This makes a lot of sense to me and if the school teams with industry to find out what its needs are, then I am sure it’s a winner.
Iowa claims that it is not making these changes due to financial reasons but instead, because of its market is changing. This is good news and I wish all of the states’ public academic institutions would do the same.
In past columns, I have written about how small businesses are dying. The trend over the past decade or so is that more small businesses are dying than are being born. This is systemic to our nation. Is this good or is it bad? I don’t know. I do believe that this is bad and we, as small-business owners, better do something about it for the sake of our children and grandchildren.
Small-business owners, academia, think tanks, trade associations and politicians better get their heads together and figure out how to reverse this trend. I propose that we start a project in Utah to see whether or not America needs a growing and prosperous small-business sector and, if so, put together a blueprint on how to solve the problem and what action steps need to be taken.
Yes, I was born to be free and so were you. I was also born with God-given talents to become prosperous by owning a small business.
Robert Pembroke is chairman of Pembroke’s Inc. and now considers himself on a permanent sabbatical. He can be reached at pembroke894@gmail.com.