When Did Business School Become All About the Parties?

The discussions of the role of social class at Harvard Business School apply to all the leading business schools where, like the rest of the world, inequality in wealth has grown tremendously. But these discussions mostly miss the underlying cause of the problem: Students from all social backgrounds who gain admission to top schools all have the intellectual horsepower to effectively compete with their classmates in academics. Not all students have equal ability to compete when it comes to participating in and throwing lavish parties. Unfortunately, as the New York Times makes clear with its revelations about the ultra-wealthy members of the mysterious “Section X” at HBS, business school has become way more about the parties than about the course work, which has left poorer students at a social—and professional—disadvantage.

At Stanford, I think it began with FOAM (Friends of Arjay Miller, a former Ford Motor senior executive and dean of the school). Students in the top 10 percent of the class are called Arjay Miller Scholars. As sort of a joke, a group that originally called itself the 11 Percenters and then became known as FOAM began with a Tuesday-night bar scene—since there are no classes on Wednesday. Some students thought it would be cool to go to Las Vegas on a Wednesday during the winter quarter—hence, Vegas FOAM—with a Tuesday-night departure, and some people dressed in costumes. Then people began going to the Sundance Film Festival—a majority of the student body now make that trek. And, of course, there are the ski houses and ski weekends, the rental houses in tony Atherton and Woodside that some second-years live in, the various charity fundraising balls, and the numerous other events and trips that I can’t even keep track of.