Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, makes the case for a person needing
to spend 10,000 hours to become expert at the highest level in his or her
field. He presents evidence related to athletics, music performance, and
professional expertise (e.g., programming a computer), among other fields. (He
emphasizes other significant factors that contribute to success, but I’m just
focusing on the hours spent working on one’s expertise here.)
This raised the question in my mind of how the 10,000 hours
compares to a college education.
Our undergraduate degrees are based on 120 credit hours of
course work. A three hour class typically has about 45 hours of “contact time,”
that is, the amount of time the student sits in class excluding examinations.
One hundred twenty hours of course work translates to 40
courses (40 courses X 3 credit hours = 120 credit hours for the degree).
Realistically, though, only 20 of those courses will be business courses. The
other 20 are courses to satisfy general education, humanities, liberal studies,
science, and so forth requirements. So, to focus on the hours contributing to
business expertise, we have
20 courses X 45 contact hours per course = 900 hours.
Educators like to assume that students spend at least as
much time preparing for class as they spend in it, so we might optimistically
double our estimate to 1800 hours. (Notably, a lot of class time is not
necessarily “active learning,” so perhaps our estimate should be labeled very optimistic.)
Thus, the undergraduate business education results in 18% of
the needed experience to achieve expertise at the highest level.
What happens if we add an MBA?
An MBA adds 12 to 20 more courses, depending on the program.
At best, we can double our estimate again to get to a grand total of 3600
hours.
This may explain why internships and work experience are
such a benefit for business students. Without these, a student has put in only
a little more than one-third of the time needed to achieve true expertise in a
business field.
Interestingly, if we add a Ph.D. we can get to the magic
10,000 hour number relatively easily. A Ph.D. program is typically like a
full-time job for at least 4 years.
40 hours per week X 50 weeks per year X 4 years = 8000
hours. This amount added to the undergraduate and MBA experience easily exceeds
10,000 – and a strong Ph.D. student is truly an expert in his/her dissertation
topic area.
In summary, it seems we should encourage our undergraduates
to take internships, our MBA students to have work experience, and our doctoral
students to approach their work as a full time job. Their prospects will be
better – and our programs will benefit from the reputation of our graduates.
