I recently appeared on Night Class, a new podcast hosted by my colleagues Scott Turner and Ian Oxnevad, to discuss a question I had asked on Minding the Campus: “What Are Business Schools Really Teaching?”

My answer, basically, is financialization.

By that, I mean an economic model organized around making money from money—or what I call “mathematical spreadsheet wizardry.” It also means turning everything about ordinary life into investment vehicles from which greater returns can be extracted. Real estate is perhaps the clearest example: A house is no longer principally a place to live but a financial asset from which investors seek the greatest possible return.

And, rather than principally cultivating the kind of entrepreneurship that creates new businesses, goods, and services, business schools are training students in the tools of financialization and preparing them for careers in private equity, investment management, and commercial real estate.

Blackstone is one example I discussed in my piece. The Government Accountability Office found in 2024 that institutional investors may have contributed to higher home prices and rents in markets where their ownership is concentrated, making housing less affordable for ordinary Americans.

Scott, Ian, and I then turned to the other side of this equation: the highly credentialed but downwardly mobile Americans attracted to the Democratic Socialists of America. I wrote about this group before. Its members are highly credentialed, but many do not have good jobs or good income. Many are saddled with student debt and struggling to buy homes.

So, on the one hand, our business schools are training graduates for lucrative careers in industries whose practices have helped make things such as housing more expensive. On the other, higher education has also produced highly credentialed graduates angry that they cannot afford the lives their degrees were supposed to provide.

Scott, Ian, and I tried to connect the dots on Night Class. You can watch our conversation below or on YouTube.