SNU Dean Hits on US Business School Culture
By Cho Jin-seo
Staff Reporter
It seems that bankers are again raking in astronomical bonuses while jobs are becoming harder to get for the rest of the country.
If such inequality is a result of the financial crisis, the Western model of business education will not be able to fix it on its own, said the dean of Seoul's most prominent business school.
"The U.S. style of business education is mass manufacturing greedy professionals," criticizes Ahn Tae-sik, in charge of business education at Seoul National University (SNU).
"At SNU, we don't want to replicate that culture. We do not want our students to become investment bankers who do whatever they can to get their salary raised from $10 million to $20 million. That is neither socially-responsible nor sustainable leadership."
Ahn has a point. While the average personal income of American citizens is less than double that of Koreans, the average salary of CEOs at American firms is about 14 times that of their counterparts here.
The income disparity in America is even larger when it comes to bankers - a U.S. magazine joked this week that the average Goldman Sachs employee could buy 3,240 homes in Detroit with their annual bonus.
"We can't blame individual bankers for being greedy about money. But we should think that there is something wrong with a financial system that has nourished such greed," Ahn said.
South Korea has emerged from the financial crisis in much better shape than the United States, and has experienced much less of a social backlash aimed at the finance industry and business schools.
SNU deserves to feel proud of this. Though its name is rarely visible in annual business school rankings surveys of American financial papers, the university's College of Business Administration has been an engine behind the country's economic growth over the past half a century.
According to Monthly CEO, a business magazine, 6.8 percent of CEOs at the top 500 companies in Korea are graduates from Ahn's program, while roughly one-third are SNU alumni.
Business schools in the United States and Europe are now increasingly introducing business ethics and corporate social responsibility classes in their curricula. But Ahn scoffs at such a notion.
"You cannot suddenly teach people to behave in an ethical manner. It should be dispersed throughout the curriculum, and the role of the teacher is very important in this. Professors at many schools in the West are simply experts, while our teachers act as role models as well."
In explaining the difference, he used the Korean term "seuseung" to describe SNU teachers. The word refers to someone who is a combination of teacher, mentor, role model and sage.
Ahn, an accounting professor, has introduced some teaching methods that would likely be considered too radical in the West. Last year, he sent 84 undergraduate students, 19 of them female, to a notorious three-day boot camp at a military special forces unit.
"To be a good leader, it helps to know what complete submission is. Leadership is a two-way street," he said.
Launched three years ago, the one-year SNU Global MBA program accepts 50 students every year and only about 15 percent of them are funded by their employers.
"That means that our students are self-motivated to make changes in their life. This is a very positive sign, because we want risk-takers in our program," Ahn said, adding that such risks certainly do not include financial gambles such as those bankers at Lehman Brothers took before it went bust.