Bachelor of Management: A Degree in Leading Teams You've Never Worked On
Once upon a time—back when people smoked in offices and being “data-driven” meant owning a calculator—studying Management meant you were headed somewhere serious. It implied status, ambition, and maybe even a corner office with a fax machine and a secretary named Carol. University was elite. You didn’t go because you needed a “college experience”—you went because you were being groomed to run something: a factory, a department, a country club, something. A Management degree was shorthand for “future boss.”
Today? Not so much.
Now, the Bachelor’s in Management is what you pick when the career quiz in high school said you were “people-oriented,” and you took that to mean “CEO material.” It’s a vague, glorified participation trophy disguised as a major—offering students the comfort of career ambition without the burden of knowing what they actually want to do.
It’s academic purgatory with a $60k price tag. No hard skills, no technical output, just weekly classes on how to give feedback and “inspire teams,” taught by someone who’s never managed a living human outside of a breakout room.
Let’s not sugar-coat it: this isn’t a degree. It’s a personality test gone rogue.
Management: Because Who Needs Skills When You Have Opinions
The genius of the undergrad Management degree is its bold, confident avoidance of anything concrete. It skips the whole “becoming good at something” phase and fast-tracks you straight to “telling other people how to do the thing you never learned.” Why master a skill when you can minor in confidence and major in vague ambition?
You don’t need to code, design, calculate, build, invent, or perform. That’s grunt work. You’re here to oversee. Direct. Delegate. Inspire. From the safety of a group chat.
While your engineering friend is learning calculus and crying into AutoCAD, you’re attending “Leadership in the 21st Century” and watching YouTube clips of Steve Jobs in a black turtleneck. Your medical student housemate is dissecting cadavers; you’re dissecting case studies about fictional corporations with suspiciously generic names like “AlphaCorp” or “SynerTech.”
Your big academic achievement? Successfully identifying your leadership style in a multiple-choice quiz. Are you a “Visionary”? A “Coach”? Or, more likely, a “Ghost”—especially when the group assignment deadline looms and your contribution is limited to changing the slide font to Helvetica.
But when graduation rolls around, your diploma has the word “Management” printed proudly on it. As if the world is about to hand you a team to lead. It won’t.
Instead, you’ll begin your corporate journey staring at spreadsheets, sitting in “syncs,” and pretending to understand acronyms like “QBR” and “KPI.” Your job is not to manage—it’s to silently observe and forward emails.
Still, you tell yourself you’re “business-minded.” You read Harvard Business Review headlines and occasionally mention “disruption” in conversation. It’s not about what you do, it’s about how convincingly you nod during meetings.
And that, apparently, is leadership.
Generalist Education in a Specialist Economy: The Great Mismatch
We live in an era where society simultaneously glorifies the “T-shaped professional” (broad generalist with deep expertise) and somehow forgets to mention that the vertical part of the “T” actually requires, you know, doing something well. But enter the Bachelor’s in Management—where students skip that deep part altogether and try to float entirely on a strong LinkedIn summary.
Generalists can be incredibly valuable. But only after they’ve gotten good at something. You don’t get to be the conductor of the orchestra just because you know what violins look like. You have to know how to play first—or at least understand why the brass section hates the woodwinds.
Yet the undergrad Management student is told, confidently, that they’re “big picture thinkers,” “systems-oriented,” and “future leaders.” Meanwhile, they’ve never been responsible for anything more critical than booking the breakout room on Google Calendar.
They speak of “strategy” like it’s a spiritual calling. But what they’re calling “strategy” is often just high-level guesswork with a buzzword garnish. Pivot. Scale. Synergy. You know the drill.
This might’ve worked back when a degree was a rare, golden ticket. You could bluff your way into mid-management by virtue of owning a tie and not chewing gum in meetings. But in today’s hyper-competitive, credential-bloated job market? A Management degree without a skillset is just another decorative scroll for the bookshelf.
It’s a generalist education, marketed as versatility, but delivered with all the real-world utility of a paper MBA printed on a coffee cup. You’re being trained to “lead” in a world that increasingly only rewards those who can execute.
You’re not a generalist. You’re an undeclared major with delusions of grandeur.
University: The Credential Factory That Sold You a Leadership Identity
Universities used to be cathedrals of knowledge. Now they’re marketing departments with lecture halls. And few things are easier to brand, bundle, and sell to anxious 18-year-olds than the promise of leadership—especially when “leadership” is never clearly defined and conveniently doesn’t require doing anything difficult.
The Management degree is the academic version of retail therapy. “Not sure what to do with your life? No problem! Just enroll in this vaguely businessy-sounding degree, and we’ll tell you you’re a leader.” Boom. Sold. Add to cart.
They’ll flatter you endlessly: You’re a visionary. You’re a systems thinker. You’re the kind of person who makes things happen. Translation: you once told your high school debate team to “circle back” and now believe you were born to run the operations at Spotify.
So you sign up. You take courses called things like “Leadership in the Age of Innovation” or “Strategic Thinking for Global Contexts.” You write papers on "organizational synergy" and annotate HBR articles written in 1997 by a retired VP of Marketing named Dale. You submit group projects you didn’t attend meetings for. You learn to say things like “let’s double-click on that” with alarming confidence.
By year three, you have a diploma and a LinkedIn profile that includes phrases like “aspiring change agent” and “passionate about cross-functional collaboration,” despite the fact that your most recent collaboration ended with you rage-deleting a shared Google Doc.
And while your more grounded friends are becoming doctors, developers, and civil engineers, you’re refreshing job listings for “business analyst,” praying they don’t ask about Excel formulas in the interview.
But don’t worry—you know Kotter’s 8-Step Change Model. Which is perfect, because step one is “Create urgency,” and your bank account already has that covered.
The Dangerous Fantasy of the Pre-Manager
The Pre-Manager—birthed in lecture halls, forged in group projects, and anointed by professors who haven’t managed anything but office hours since 2004. These bright-eyed grads emerge from undergrad Management programs not with a skillset, but with a LinkedIn banner that says “Future Leader.” And that’s the problem.
Management is not something you start with. It’s what happens after you’ve proven you can show up, deliver, and make it through a week without asking “what’s the WiFi password again?” It’s earned, not assumed. But the Pre-Manager skips that messy middle part and tries to go from zero to leadership like they’re unlocking a feature on a freemium app.
Studying Management as your first move is like trying to become a conductor without learning an instrument. You know where everyone should be standing, but not why they keep ignoring you.
Real management is a minefield of messy humans, broken systems, conflicting incentives, and passive-aggressive emails. You don’t learn how to navigate that by watching TED Talks and taking personality quizzes. You learn it by living through workplace chaos. By doing the job. Screwing up. Fixing it. Repeating.
Great managers—actual managers—have done the work, solved the problems, and earned the authority to guide others. They know when to step in, when to back off, and when Kevin needs to be gently told that Notion is not, in fact, a project management tool—it’s a fancy notebook with a PR team.
No one respects a manager who’s never done the work. They might tolerate them, sure—but with the same enthusiasm you’d have for a lifeguard who’s never been in a pool.
So here’s the truth: you can’t major in leadership. You have to earn it.
Let’s call it what it is: an undergraduate Management degree is professional make-believe. Academic LARPing. You're not leading anything—you're play-acting in PowerPoint while borrowing theories from Harvard professors who retired before Slack was invented. It’s the illusion of authority without the scars, the stress, or the sheer emotional damage of trying to get Dave from Sales to submit his report on time.
Because real management? That’s not a major. That’s a promotion—earned, not declared at orientation week between a barbecue and a careers fair.
The uncomfortable truth is that if you're not sure what to study, Management shouldn't be your fallback. In fact, maybe just... don't go to university yet? Radical, we know. Go work. Go build a terrible startup. Go make coffee at a place that makes you cry inside. Learn how real work feels. Then—only then—come back and study how to lead the people doing it.
Want to be a generalist? Fantastic. But do it the right way. Go deep first. Actually learn to do something. Anything. Excel, write code, fix engines, edit videos—whatever. Mastery first, then management.
Until then, you're not a leader. You're a placeholder with a LinkedIn banner that says "Aspiring Innovator" and a résumé that screams "Managed a group project, kind of."