Students in the country’s top MBA programs pride themselves on their open-mindedness. This is, after all, what they’ve been sold: American business schools market their ability to train the kinds of broadly competent, intellectually receptive people who will help solve the problems of a global economy.



But in truth, MBA programs are not the open forums advertised in admissions brochures. Behind this façade, they are ideological institutions committed to a strict blend of social liberalism and economic conservatism. Though this fusion may be the favorite of American elites—the kinds of people who might repeat that tired line “I’m socially liberal but fiscally conservative”—it takes a strange form in business school. Elite business schooling is tailored to promote two types of solutions to the big problems that arise in society: either greater innovation or freer markets. Proposals other than what’s essentially more business are brushed aside, or else patched over with a type of liberal politics that’s heavy on rhetorical flair but light on relevance outside privileged circles.

It is in this closed ideological loop that we wannabe masters of the universe often struggle to think clearly about the common good or what it takes to achieve it. Today’s MBA programs, insofar as they churn out graduates riveted to this worldview, limit the vision of future leaders at a time when public dissatisfaction with business and its institutions makes our complacency a danger.

A few weeks ago, I took part in a class discussion about a new app called Nesterly, which was hatched here at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management (where I attend as an MBA student) and released last summer. The app serves millennials in search of affordable housing by linking them with seniors who, for a reduced rate, will rent spare rooms in exchange for help around the house. It’s a neat idea, and the app has garnered funding and attention—enough to make it a topic in class.

As students dissected Nesterly’s business model, however, we each made the same omission. Lost in the talk of user interfaces and customer segments and pricing strategies was an appropriate nod to context, political or economic. The platform’s supply-demand symmetry hadn’t arisen in a vacuum, but from an economy where housing price inflation and debt held by the young had met its match in record financial insecurity and isolation among the old. A generation lampooned for living with its parents was settling into grandpa’s garage apartment, and none of us considered it noteworthy.