Better Business – Better Society?

“Better Business – Better Society”. It’s an attractive tagline, suitable for a top business school. Kylteri’s journalist Ahmed Hewidy digs into the meaning behind these fine words.

Corporate-university partnerships: What a concept! The value proposition of these collaborations is compelling to all parties: they provide the university with increased funding, students with hands-on employer-specific experience and potential employment, and the partnered corporation with access to fresh talent and new perspectives at a competitive price. This may be great, but I wonder, how much does a classroom cost?

The presence of partnerships enables corporations to exert a degree of passive influence on universities. Monetary partnerships carry implicit incentives to remain positive about said partners and their work. These biases need not be conscious, as ideologies rarely are. It is less about what is being taught and more about what could have been taught were it not in the interest of the university to remain appealing to corporations. To paraphrase jazz icon Miles Davis: “Jazz is about the notes you don’t play” and ideologies are about the ideas not taught. It’s like lobbying, but instead of lobbying the government, they’re lobbying for your brain.

The School Of Business currently has close to a dozen premium partners, with all the Big Four of PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and EY finding their way into such partnerships. Aalto’s website has some discussion on these partnerships, for example, it refers to PwC’s cooperation as being “actively involved in the School’s teaching”. That statement may be innocuous on its face, but, if it were to be even a little true, it would be cause for concern. Young students entering university come in with an open mind, and many of them will graduate to positions of relative power. Corporations are keenly aware of the influence our students can have on the future. It’s the duty of a university to provide them with a balanced and well-founded view of the world. Partnerships cannot provide this. Corporate partnerships are rarely about funding education, they are about manufacturing consent for the status quo, one which benefits the wealthy and shirks any accountability held by them.

If some large consulting company steals a couple of billion they pay a fine and then get to promote themselves in classrooms.

The list of fraud conducted by the Big Four is vast. Sikka and Hampton (2019) point out that the tax avoidance schemes, far from being an unfortunate side-effect of poor accounting and auditing, are in fact services that the Big Four actively advertise and sell to their clients. The aggregate impact of this is to shift the tax burden onto less well-off citizens since the monetary return on tax avoidance scales with wealth. In either case, litigations suffered by these companies can never be an accurate assessment of the true negative externalities they cause. In my estimation, the fines paid by these companies for tax fraud tend to be only 5-10% of the face value of the lost tax income due to their behaviour. Furthermore, criminal prosecutions were practically non-existent. If I stole a couple of thousand euros I would be in jail; if some large consulting company steals a couple of billion they pay a fine and then get to promote themselves in classrooms.

Unfortunately, data from non-western nations is much more difficult to come by, though these companies have not shied away from exporting their corruption and pressuring less well-endowed justice systems. For example, during the 2020 protests in Hong Kong, the Big Four jointly published a series of advertisements warning citizens not to push for democratization (2020, Financial Times). Large firms have a strong interest in skirting accountability and universities truly ought to avoid being in the business of whitewashing corporate optics by giving them a strong platform to do so.

Persistent budget cuts by right-wing cabinets have forced universities to turn towards the commercialization and corporatization of their education just to make ends meet.

This isn’t just an Aalto problem. The Ministry of Education and Culture’s funding for Aalto has been in a consistent, year-to-year decline between 2011-2019. Inflation-adjusted, the ministry’s contribution to Aalto in 2021 is down 30% from its 2011 value (Aalto Board Report and Financial Statement, 2021). In 2022, for the first time since the turn of the millennium, Finland’s tertiary education rates have slipped below the OECD average (YLE.fi). Persistent budget cuts by right-wing cabinets have forced universities to turn towards the commercialization and corporatization of their education just to make ends meet. This sucks. It sucks for the university to have to sacrifice its independence to appeal to corporations. It sucks for students whose educational curriculum can be influenced by corporations. It sucks for a society to sell its public education to private interests.

I have spent half of my life living during an economic downturn borne to fruition by the financial corruption of some of our partners. This downturn would then be used to justify slashing our educational budgets, forcing the university to find these same private partners to cover the holes left behind by austerity. Our partners have lit the flames of our economic peril, yet they cover our classrooms, parading themselves as heroes. A decade of austerity has left our educational system destitute, waning almost to the breaking point. Our lecturers do a commendable task remaining as politically neutral as possible under all circumstances, always disavowing any overt political opinion. They do this in a room named Deloitte. In a very literal sense, the medium is the message. A message that profit is the only motive and that education must serve it. I reject this framing. The spaces we inhabit are both a reflection of who we are and who we want to be. I don’t want to be in a better, more profitable business. I want to be in a better society, and we should not let businesses dictate what a “better” society looks like.

So, how much does a classroom cost? It costs integrity.  

The writer is an economics student with a strong interest in issues of social and economic justice. He likes to question the authority we bestow upon wealth and hopes that you may do so too.