This year, for the first time, a brand-new metric was introduced to the lexicon of evaluating universities, and more importantly business schools: teaching power. 

It’s the brainchild of the London Financial Times, which arranged for Open Syllabus, an American non-profit, to track the frequency and amount of work done by professors and their business schools which appears in course descriptions and reading lists assigned to students, rather than the traditional measurement of researchers being cited in academic papers.

The motive behind this new metric is to help students make best use of the resources that are available as they prepare to study, while giving the necessary recognition to academics who are great teachers but, up until now, have lurked in the shadows away from the light shone on researchers. 

The ultimate hope, as Open Syllabus director Joe Karaganis told the FT, is to “revalue teaching by helping them to claim credit for work they do with significance in the classroom”.

The inaugural teaching power ranking has been based on the business publications with the most references in course descriptions and reading lists since 2015. The other proviso was that the citations had to be freely available online and credited to the business schools where the authors were either based, retired from or had a long association with.

The rankings make for interesting reading; they’re dominated by Harvard, some of the other great American business schools, then the UK and Europe. As a disclaimer, I must disclose that the highest-ranked business school campused in Africa is Henley — where I am dean and director — at number 17, well ahead of some of the great British institutions like Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

But the most important thing that they do is hopefully force a rethink on education. We spend an incredible amount on education in this country despite the belief to the contrary, but it’s not working. 

Our primary and secondary school education is still dysfunctional, if we look at the metrics of the sheer number of pupils who fall out between Grade 1 and Grade 12, but our tertiary system, in spite of many good individuals, is fairly woeful too.

For a start, our legacy institutions are training for obsolescence; the figures show us this. We are living in a world that was already undergoing seismic change because of the advent of the Fourth Industrial Revolution before the unprecedented disruption of Covid-19, but we were not reacting to it: 45% of the people who were formally employed before the lockdown had skills that were mismatched for the jobs they did. 

Most of our graduates were entering a jobs market where perhaps a quarter of those self-same jobs won’t exist in a few years’ time, replaced by ones that we haven’t even begun to conceptualise yet.

And then there are the vacancies that we aren’t training for: 30,000 nurses, 10,000 pharmacy assistants and 40,000 teachers. That’s not forgetting the fact that in an increasingly digitised world, we have only managed to produce 17,000 graduates in the past 10 years for the 70,000 positions that exist.

That’s at the meta level. We never drill down to actually find out how effective our teaching actually is, because the focus is always on research output — vital of course, but we all know that researchers do not always make the best teachers. 

There’s also the often-controversial issue of what is being researched; academic freedom and security of tenure may mean that academics often research arcane subjects that fascinate them, if they can justify it on an academic basis, and are publishable, rather than researching issues that have far greater societal impact, requiring intensive and difficult research to emerge with sustainable and practical solutions that benefit far more people and have broader impact.

Part of the problem we have faced — the elephant in the room — is that beyond the post-course “happy sheets”, there are no real ways of truly gauging the effect that our teachers have and, accordingly, rewarding the best, weeding out the worst and training up those in between. 

Imagine how we could start to change the entire system if we could start measuring the output of our teachers and recalibrating the relevance of what is being taught? 

Imagine if we could start to honour teachers for the impact they have on their students’ lives, on businesses, on society, on the economy, the way we honour researchers? And perhaps, because this is hard, we default back to the old, trusted, but no longer trustworthy model.

This study is particularly important for business schools though, because business schools are the intersection between the groves of academia and the din of the machine room or trading floors, where the theory that is taught has to be both pragmatic and practical, able to be measured as a return on investment — in this case, the teaching. 

When you teach at an MBA level, you need to have people who can teach at master’s level, at an executive level, and engage with people. A good business school is talking to businesspeople, not academics.

Teachers matter — many people can remember that one great teacher who changed their lives. It’s time to refocus education into creating legions of great teachers to change legions of lives. And pay them more: “What do teachers make?” Well, not that much money, but they do make a huge difference. It’s time we rewarded that difference.

How effective are we? How important are the programmes we offer? Complex understandings and skills are taught by great teachers; they don’t just arrive by magic. 

To my mind, the quality of our teaching has never been more critical given the absolute scale of disruption, ambiguity and volatility in the world today — market and epidemiological contagion included.

We need to teach business leaders the skills to be able to navigate these… teach them to lead their teams and teach them to stay sane in the process. 

We need to have masters of management practice, business activism and the more common business administration so that we can ensure that the people we teach will go on to build the businesses that will build Africa.

Creating prosperity; jobs and opportunities, investing in the infrastructure of our broader society, partnering with the state where it sorely needs our expertise and conserving our planet is really the only sustainable way to go about building a better future for all of us — and reducing the gaping Gini coefficient once and for all.

And that all starts with measuring the teaching power of our business schools and keeping us honest and true to what we say we want to do. DM