Everyone Passes, No One Wins

When business schools killed their own filter

I keep thinking about something business schools quietly eliminated: the funnel.

Not the marketing kind. The real one. The uncomfortable one. The one that decides who actually makes it through.

Serious systems use staged pressure. Military academies, elite sports programs, medical training, consulting promotion tracks, startup accelerators like Y Combinator, even apprenticeship systems. You enter one stage, prove something, then earn the next one. Not because these systems enjoy pain, although some probably do, but because the final badge needs to mean something.

Business schools used to understand this better. Now too many resemble a subscription model with a graduation ceremony at the end.

Pay, progress, repeat.

And yes, this collapse of the funnel did not happen because one evil dean pressed a big red button marked “lower standards.” It happened because the incentives bent that way. Parents want return on tuition. Students want progression without friction. Schools want retention, rankings, satisfaction scores, and fewer complaints. Faculty are pressured to “support” students, which too often means absorbing their lack of effort. The result is a polite machine where almost everyone keeps moving, even when many clearly should not.

Students know it. They optimize around it. Which classes can I skip? Which exams can I retake? Where can I recover ECTS with minimal effort? It becomes a game of navigation, not excellence.

In my own classes, I cannot rebuild the whole system. But I can create small gates. Multiple deliverables. Sequential steps. Shared Notion results, visible to everyone. Peer pressure starts doing some of the work the institution no longer wants to do.

I also track professional engagement: punctuality, focus, attitude, questions, teamwork, contribution, and whether a student’s presence moves the group forward or slows it down. It is visible on the shared Notion, so the class can see behavior as a pattern, not as a private excuse machine. It has no official grade impact. It is not endorsed by any school I teach at. But it sends the signal that standards are not just what you produce at the end. They are how you show up all the way through.

If business schools want credibility in a world where knowledge is free and AI is everywhere, they need to stop selling progression and start defending standards.

Because a diploma without a filter is just a receipt.