this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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I had two semesters of business classes and yes it do be like that.
Richard Wolff made a great point when he said that capitalism has two college departments dedicated to teaching about it: One is called economics, whose purpose is to train people on how to cheerlead the system using purely hypothetical concepts. The other is called business school, and it exists because economics departments don't actually teach somebody how to administrate capitalist enterprise, so they have to educate different people on how to actually make the system function.
You take classes on management where you learn about the different organizational management strategies, you take basic economics classes, you take corporate law 101 where you learn about contracts and whatever, you take finance 101 where you learn about compound interest, you take the most basic computer programming class where you pretend you understand anything about how programming works, you take marketing 101 where you learn how the US works, you take logistics 101 where you learn how to calculate a full truck load vs a less than full truck load of shit being shipped around at various costs, you take accounting where you learn basic asset vs liabilities stuff, you take trig -> calculus so you can understand anything at all about how chart go up sometimes.. there's a few more but i forgot them already
I went to business school because i took 1 semester of comp sci and nope'd right out of it and over into management information systems.
you take marketing 101 where you learn how the US works
This, pretty much what I had in school, business admin degree. I got it because I wasn't good at anything else and needed to graduate in 3 years. Although I had more accounting classes than any advance math.
Thank you for your serious answer, seems to have some utility if you’re so inclined
Wait, you still need to get the Master of NLP certificate outside of school? At least tell me they made How to win friends and influence people required reading.
wasn't at my uni, but wouldn't surprise me if it was at others
Get drunk, commit DUIs, harrass women, make sure daddy's connections make it all go away.
You know, important stuff they need to know in order to be the future capitalists of tomorrow.
Well but that's the same in economics
actuaries and accounting people study mathematics
This is not true for accounting at all
They study number theory, i won’t hear otherwise
They do not and I know this from experience. Everyone always says “oh you’re in accounting so you must be good at math” and it’s so wrong. All of the math is basic operations with little complex amortization. It is just the application of rules to know when and to what extent something gets added or subtracted. The rest of it is understanding both sides of double entry accounting and that a balance sheet needs to balance.
For business school generally they teach you that you are a master of the universe with special gifts and power to change things and do stuff. They really inflate egos with the finance, economics and management courses. Like everything important is already quantified and categorized and segmented.
The reality is that it is a place to become acculturated into a jargony world of abstractions and to network with people whose disdain for ethics (usually a required course) is always in plain view.
Accounting did help me understand Marx though so I’ll give it that and it was that “concreteness” that led me to pursue instead of Econ or finance
Accounting people study arcane rules on how to fill forms the correct way. the biggest mistake in my life was getting an accounting technician certification. Absolutely disgusting.
Read self-help books and corporate promotional materials. I'm not even joking (though obviously there's a lot of other stuff).
Some of the course material is legit from multi level marketing people and cults. Looked up one of the authors and they has a YouTube channel we're they would start videos telling people that it's not a cult.
I got a business degree because I didn't know what else to do, and I kind of don't know what I did.
For some group assignments I'd rock up late, collect two international students that didn't have a group yet, then just do the whole thing myself.
For other assignments I just wrote everything off the top of my head and used my saved references in Word to substantiate any claims I made.
I probably learned more from the job I got in the last year of uni and two business books I read at that time. Not textbooks, airport style business books.
Was talking to a guy that got a business degree 30 years ago that on the subject of Chihese electric cars said they were able to sell them so cheap / gain market share was because of government subsidies
"Didn't U.S. automakers get billions of dollars in bailouts that they used to do stock buybacks instead of updating their businesses??"
"Well yeah but the Chinese will charge less until they run people out of business and then raise prices"
"Isn't that basically every large company?? FAANG companies, Uber, etc etc etc"
"Well yeah..."
Networking, blackmail ring formation, arithmetic for cokeheads.
Yeah the actual degree aside, the valuable part of the education is networking.
If you did business school, but weren't social - you completely wasted your time and money.
I took business statistics because I needed to graduate and I was tired of real math classes. I never went to a single lecture and the prof let us use the textbook for every exam. I'm assuming the grand majority of business classes are like this.
I took a bunch of "Intro to ..." classes. Learned a bunch of vocabulary words.
I remember "Intro to Business Law" was a bit interesting. Legal systems typically being centuries of band-aid/duct tape/bubble gum fixes for things causing a system to have all sorts of "rules" and interactions that take super nerds to parse through.
Human Resources Management class definitely opens your eyes to the truth that "HR departments are not the friend of the workers" when it really comes down to it.
I remember taking a class... it wasn't accounting (because no dedicated Accounting classes were required) but had some chunk of the classwork be a project where you sorted invoices into accounts payable/receivable piles and figure out how much "you" owed somebody or were owed by somebody.