The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected a bid by Boise to overturn a lower court’s ruling that prohibited authorities in the Idaho city from prosecuting homeless people for staying outside if a bed at an emergency shelter is not available.
The justices left in place a ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that fining or jailing homeless people for sleeping in public or unauthorized places violates the U.S. Constitution’s bar on cruel and unusual punishment, a decision the city said threatens public health and safety.
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The case centered on two Boise ordinances that prohibit camping or “disorderly conduct” by lodging or sleeping in public. The city said it needed to enforce the ordinances to prevent the formation of encampments that can lead to unsanitary conditions and crimes such as drug dealing and gang activity, and to keep public spaces accessible for residents, visitors and wildlife.
The dispute began when six people - Robert Martin, Robert Anderson, Lawrence Lee Smith, Basil Humphrey, Janet Bell and Pamela Hawkes, all current or former homeless Boise residents - sued the city in 2009, arguing that the laws violated their constitutional rights.
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They had each been prosecuted under the ordinances and fined between $25 and $75. Five were sentenced to time served, while Hawkes twice served one day in jail.
The 9th Circuit last year ruled that the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibits punishing homeless individuals if there are more of them than available shelter beds. The ruling allowed the plaintiffs to seek an injunction against enforcement of the city’s ordinances.
“As long as there is no option of sleeping indoors, the government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter,” the appeals court said.
On a visitto New York in October Marc Benioff, boss of Salesforce, compared Facebook to cigarettes and backed a corporate tax hike to deal with homelessness in San Francisco. If badmouthing a fellow technology giant and cheering the taxman were not heterodox enough for a billionaire entrepreneur, Mr Benioff laid into American management education. It “programmes” students to favour profit over the public good. This, he noted, is out of step with “the new capitalism”.
Many deans concur. “We need our students to be thoughtful about the role of business in society, particularly at a moment in time when capitalism is coming under attack,” says William Boulding of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business. Nitin Nohria of Harvard Business School (hbs) reports how younger alumni and incoming classes want “the place of work to reflect purpose and values”. Jonathan Levin of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (gsb) talks of business schools’ responsibility to recognise the societal consequences of corporate actions. “Corporations, their leaders and owners need to act to restore trust,” he intones.
America’s business schools still dominate ourannual rankingof the world’s topmbas (see table). But the industry is being shaken up. According to the Graduate Management Admission Council (gmac), an industry association, Americanmbaprogrammes received 7% fewer applicants this year than last. Nearly three-quarters of full-time, two-yearmbaprogrammes reported declines from coast to coast. Not even the most illustrious ones were spared:hbs(located in Boston) and Stanford’sgsb(in Palo Alto) both saw applications dip by 6% or so. Schools face growing competition from overseas and online programmes—and, as Mr Benioff’s critique implies, questions over hidebound curriculums. “We’re being disrupted left, right and centre,” confesses Susan Fournier, dean of Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.
When management education boomed in the 1960s, American schools taught mostly American students. As the world economy globalised in the 1980s and 1990s, so too did American curriculums and student bodies. Sangeet Chowfla, who headsgmac, now discerns a “third wave”: improved schools outside America are letting foreign students study closer to home (and future employers). Many offer cheaper one-yearmbas, popular in Europe but uncommon across the pond. Whereas three in four two-yearmbaprogrammes in America saw declines in overseas applicants in the latest application cycle, numbers applying to Asian business schools rose by 9% from 2017 to 2018. A recent uptick in America’s anti-immigrant sentiment is accelerating the trend.
Americans, too, are cooling onmbas. More than half of American schools report fewer domestic applicants. Soaring tuition costs, which have far outpaced inflation, put them off as much as they do foreigners. A top-notchmbawill set you back more than $200,000 (including living costs). Even with financial aid, many students are saddled with $100,000 debts at graduation. The opportunity cost of forgoing two years’ worth of paycheques is higher when the economy is booming and labour markets are tight. Weak demand has caused the number of full-timembaprogrammes in America to fall by nearly a tenth between 2014 and 2018, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, another industry body.
Geoffrey Garrett, dean of the Wharton School, at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that a flight to quality is benefiting top institutions like his—and their graduates. Add non-wage compensation and alumni often recoup their investments in a few years. Not counting signing bonuses, the average base salary for graduates of the five American schools with the highest earning potential was $139,000.
Consultancies and investment banks, historically the keenestmbarecruiters, claim their appetite for holders of elite degrees has not diminished. A prestigiousmba“puts a floor on your career”, explains Kostya Simonenko, a 28-year-old consultant on leave from Oliver Wyman (which is paying for his course at Columbia Business School). Silicon Valley, which used to dismissmbas as overpaid know-nothings, has become less hostile. As startups grow into large corporations, they need managers to help run things, not just software engineers to run code. A survey of recruiters bygmacthis year found that 80% of technology companies planned to hirembas, on a par with consultancies (82%) and financial firms (77%).
Even the finest schools, though, are not sheltered from the forces buffeting business education. Global competition and new technology platforms enable a lower cost structure for the delivery of high-quality courses. This forces “a reckoning of thembavalue proposition”, says Ms Fournier.
As part of that reckoning, Questrom has teamed up with edx, a big online-education firm, to offer a fullmbadegree online for just $24,000, less than a third of the cost of its on-campus equivalent. Better to cannibalise yourself than let others do it, as Ms Fournier puts it.mit’s Sloan School of Management provides similarly affordable bundles of online courses, dubbed MicroMasters, in areas like supply-chain management and finance. These grant certificates but the credits will be honoured if a student one day decides to pursue a full degree. 2u, an online-education platform, is introducing deferred-tuition schemes for some hybridmbadegrees. It will share the upfront costs with its business-school partners; students will pay only when they get a job.
It is not just howmbacourses are taught that is changing. So, too, is what they teach. Many budding woke capitalists agree with Mr Benioff—and demand to be taught business beyond the primacy of shareholder value. At Stanford Luisa Gerstner, a millennialmbastudent from Germany, notes that sustainable capitalism plays a more central role in European schools. Julia Osterman, her American classmate, laments how, despite some social, environmental and ethical topics in its curriculum, core classes are still “too Finance 101”.
Some of their professors are not so sure. One greybeard athbsestimates that a third of its faculty (and many older alumni) view the embrace of cuddly “stakeholder capitalism” as an unrigorous sop to political correctness. It certainly introduces lots of grey areas, Mr Boulding concedes. But, he says, schools can at least provide students with “frameworks for making choices”. A new course at Duke is entitled “Capitalism and Common Purpose in a World of Differences”.hbshas made “Leadership and Corporate Accountability” (which delves into “the responsibilities of business to the broader system in which it is embedded”) a required first-year course, with case studies weighing up things like the morality of looking beyond financial metrics at Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund.
Recoding academies
Curriculums are being transformed in less lofty ways, too. Employers, who partly or wholly bankroll half of all executive education, which earns elite schools between $100m and $150m a year, want it to impart technical skills. In response, deans such as Costis Maglaras, the newish head of Columbia Business School (and an engineer by training), are bolting courses on data, analytics and programming onto the timetable. As their popularity rises, they may displace stodgier subjects. Columbia used to offer several courses on debt markets but now offers perhaps one each academic year. Meanwhile, students have flocked to coding classes. The idea is not to turn business types into boffins but to prepare them to work with and manage technical staff, says Mr Maglaras. A recruiter for a big consultancy affirms that tech-savvymbas are “very attractive”.
Richard Lyons, former dean of the Haas Business School at the University of California, Berkeley, sees the future in providing lifelong professional education as a service: “Give alumni know-how on demand, searchable online.” Scott DeRue, dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, is giving alumni tuition-free access to executive education. “The new stuff will come from insurgents, not the bigmbaschools,” thinks John Kao, a management guru who formerly taught athbs. He wants training benchmarks and standardised transcripts to make skills portable and universally recognised.
Athbs, home to perhaps the most hallowedmba, Mr Nohria accepts that the market for its traditional offering is shrinking. In a sign of the times, his school has frozen tuition fees. He sees a dramatic expansion for “unbundlers” of online education, who “separate knowing, doing and being”. In time, he says, they will converge with “bundlers” likehbs. Far from collapsing, he reckons, management education will the richer for it.■
This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "American business schools are reinventing the MBA"
In the cable-news version of America, the president sits in the White House issuing commands that transform the nation. Life is not like that. In the real version of America many of the biggest political choices are made not in Washington but by the states—and by two of them in particular.
Texas and California are the biggest, brashest, most important states in the union, each equally convinced that it is the future (see our Special report in this issue). For the past few decades they have been heading in opposite directions, creating an experiment that reveals whether America works better as a low-tax, low-regulation place in which government makes little provision for its citizens (Texas), or as a high-tax, highly regulated one in which it is the government’s role to tackle problems, such as climate change, that might ordinarily be considered the job of the federal government (California). Given the long-running political dysfunction in Washington, the results will determine what sort of country America becomes almost as much as the victor of the next presidential election will.
That is partly a function of size. One in five Americans calls Texas or California home. By 2050 one in four will. Over the past 20 years the two states have created a third of new jobs in America. Their economic heft rivals whole countries’. Were they nations, Texas would be the tenth-largest, ahead of Canada by gdp. California would be fifth, right behind Germany.
Texas and California are also already living America’s demographic future. Hispanics are around 40% of the two states’ populations, double the national average. Both states were early to become majority-minority. In California non-whites have outnumbered whites since 2000, and in Texas since 2005. The rest of the country is not expected to reach this threshold until the middle of the century. California and Texas educate nearly a quarter of American children, many of them poor and non-native English-speakers. Their proximity to Mexico, a country that both used to be a part of, means that as Washington procrastinates on updating America’s immigration laws they must live with the consequences.
At first glance the two states seem as different as a quinoa burger and beef brisket. California is a one-party state in which elected Republicans may soon need the kind of protection afforded to the bighorn sheep. In Texas Republicans dominate the state legislature and all the statewide executive offices: no Democrat has won a statewide race there for more than 20 years. The last Democratic presidential candidate to do so was elected over 40 years ago. Texas has no state income tax. California’s state income tax has a top rate of 13%, the highest in the union. Texas has loose environmental regulations. California is trying to use its economic might to force the rest of the country to adopt more stringent standards on carbon-dioxide emissions. Texas lets its cities sprawl; California has restrictive planning laws.
Take a closer look, though, and Texas looks more like a teenage California. The population of Texas has only recently reached the level California was at in the late 1980s. The Golden State was once a pro-sprawl, low-tax, Republican state, too. Republicans in Austin, who are feeling the first signs of political competition from Democrats in decades, have begun to focus their attention on the state’s shortcomings such as education.
That matters because Texas’s schools, like California’s, perform poorly and its universities are nowhere near as good. In the Texas legislative session which ended last month, politicians focused less on abortion and bathrooms for transgender people, and instead increased funding for public schools. If more Texans managed to vote, they might encourage politicians to do something about the state’s skimpy health-care provision, too.
This might suggest that, as Texas grows up, it will become more Californian. But, ideally, only to a degree—because California has not aged gracefully. It loses Americans each year while Texas gains them. Though the state government has made huge strides—a decade ago it was broke, now it has a healthy surplus and an overflowing rainy-day fund—the state has daunting social problems. Homelessness is just the most visible of them. Unemployment is persistently higher and incomes are more unequal in California than in the land of the ten-gallon hat.
California thinks of itself as a progressive bastion, but it has the highest poverty rate of any state in America. That is partly because regulation makes it so hard to build new homes, pushing housing costs up. It will take more than Google investing $1bn in Bay Area housing to fix that. Texas, meanwhile, lets its cities march outwards as far as they wish. In this limited respect at least, Texas is the more liberal state and California the more conservative one. Americans wanting to move to where housing is cheap, taxes low and work plentiful are voting with their U-Haul trucks and heading to Texas. Just now, Texas has more room than California to innovate and to strike a balance between small government and social support.
In America’s federal system no single state is a national template, and yet each holds lessons for all the others. As America’s largest oil producer, Texas is exceptional. By contrast, despite its faults, California remains a magnet for highly educated migrants and a formidable factory of talent and ideas—which is why it has produced Google, Facebook, Tesla, Uber and Netflix and why, despite grumblings about creeping socialism, the big venture-capital firms and Hollywood studios stay.
America can learn from both of them. That is especially true when the federal government cannot legislate—which today means most of the time—because the ability of states to decide their own fate becomes correspondingly more important.
It is possible to imagine a mash-up of the two mega-states that takes the best of both: a freedom-loving wish to keep government out of people’s private lives, a place that is friendly to business and provides opportunities for people, while also protecting the environment and funding education. California could steal Texas’s expansive approach to housebuilding; Texas could imitate California’s investment in outstanding universities. Americans elsewhere might be less alarmed by demographic change if they visited great cities like Houston, la and Dallas. Call this imagined place Texafornia. ◼
Diana Kim has spent the past 12 years photographing people living on the streets of Hawaii. But her project to humanise homelessness suddenly became very personal when her own father ended up living rough. Kim, a law student, explains how, in an effort to save him, she turned her camera on him.
My father introduced me to photography. He was a landscape photographer and I remember my early years sitting in his studio, helping him by cracking open disposable cameras and watching him make prints.
I don't have many photographs of my childhood because, over time, they've been lost but I can look back at the few I have and I can feel or smell it all over again - it's very vivid. It's a bittersweet experience when I look at the pictures of my father because at the time I didn't know what would happen.
I didn't really have the best memories of my father - he had pretty much left my mother and me by the time I was eight years old. He wasn't part of my life during my teenage years - I did see him periodically, but it was a very awkward experience trying to get to know him.
When I went to the University of Hawaii in 2003, I did my first photo essay on homelessness. I saw myself in a lot of the people I noticed on the street, and I really understood the struggle of not having a place to call your own. As a little girl I always wanted a permanent home, but after my parents separated I moved around a lot.
Then one day, about three years ago, my grandmother called and said, "Your dad is sick - something wrong with his mind." She speaks Korean and I couldn't quite understand what was going on, so I went to see him. I hadn't seen him for years so it was a real shock. He hadn't been taking his medication for schizophrenia, and he was deteriorating physically because he wasn't looking after himself.
The whole family tried really hard to get him to take his medication, or just eat something, but there was no getting through to him.
It was as if we were speaking to a wall - there was no-one there. And that's when we lost him.
He didn't become homeless because he didn't have a home - it was because the building manager and the landlord were getting complaints from residents. He was becoming a nuisance. He wasn't a danger to himself or to others, he wasn't threatening anyone, he just didn't look very respectable. The lease was not renewed, and he was evicted.
It all happened really quickly. In 2012 I went to Washington DC for a fellowship as part of my law degree. When I got back at the end of that summer, my father was truly on the streets with no place to go.
I went looking for him the day I landed. I found him standing on an intersection, right across from the fire station. I saw this figure standing there, hunched over and holding a plastic bag. I remember approaching him and calling out and he just didn't respond. He didn't look back, he didn't move.
Image copyrightDiana Kim
A woman was watching me - she came up to me and said, "Don't even bother, he's been standing there for days, he does this all the time."
And at that point my chest just constricted. I wanted to scream at her and say, "He's my dad!" But I realised that getting angry wouldn't change anything so I just turned and looked at her and said, "I have to try. I have to try."
And she nodded and walked away.
The hardest part was having to walk away so many times myself, knowing that I couldn't get through to him.
For some people walking away is the healthiest thing to do, but given my life and what I pour my heart into, walking away would have destroyed me. I had friends and family who said, "Diana, you can't get through to him, just let him go, let him be." And I just couldn't - because when I did, I felt like I was lying to myself.
Some days I just couldn't even look at him because it hurt so much to see him in that place. It's like watching someone die, slowly, not knowing how to save them. He existed in this other world, this other realm, where he was fighting someone, arguing with somebody.
Image copyrightDiana KimImage copyrightDiana Kim
The camera definitely helped me. I couldn't interact with him, so I would use the camera as a shield, as a barrier, so I could stay longer to watch him, to look through the lens and have some sort of purpose - to stay and document what was going on, knowing that later I would be able to look at it and really sort through my feelings. When I was out there standing with him in the street I felt really vulnerable and alone.
I didn't take these photographs thinking I would share them with the world, it was just something I had to do. I took them so that when I went home I could sit there and process what was happening. I didn't want to forget where he was, even if it was painful - I wanted to remember, to keep going back. I would sit there and look at the images and ask myself what I could do. A lot of it was just fuelling me to keep pushing and not give up.
In one photograph you can see his shirt is just rags and his arms are exposed, he's really skinny and his eyes are closed. That photograph was actually taken the day a hurricane was supposed to hit and I remember leaving work early and driving around trying to find him and get through to him, "Dad there's a hurricane coming - we need to take you somewhere safe, please get out of here, can you get in my car?" And he just would not move.
Image copyrightDiana KimImage copyrightDiana Kim
Because of his mental illness there was nothing that we could do. We couldn't force-feed him any of his medication, and because he wasn't a danger to himself or others it really drew it out. Then, last year he had a heart attack. That's what really saved his life.
I hadn't seen him for weeks. I had been looking for him, but I couldn't find him. Then my cousin called and said, "I got a bill in the mail regarding your dad - he's in hospital, he's had a heart attack." By then he had already been there for weeks and I didn't even know about it.
When I saw him lying there it was amazing, because he was the healthiest that I had seen him in two or three years - he was lying in a clean bed, with clothes that were the cleanest I had ever seen - hospital garments but they were clean - his face was clean, he had gained a little bit of weight and it was overwhelming. I didn't know what to do, I kept crying.
Image copyrightDiana Kim
It was a miracle. I thought he was going to die on the streets, and I always prayed that I would be able to see him healthy again.
But my grandmother passed away and that's the part that always really gets me - that she didn't get to see her son in the better place where he is now. I have sons myself, and I can only imagine the pain that she must have felt as his mother.
That was the beginning of his recovery. Now he's a lot better, he's taking his medication, he has goals. He's in sheltered housing where he has the help and assistance he needs.
When he was in hospital without any documents or ID I came up with the idea of medical bracelets for homeless people. I bought about 100 waterproof USB wristbands which can hold important information and I've given away about 60 so far.
Image copyrightDiana Kim
We take everything one step at a time. I've been helping him to use a computer and last week we did an application for a part-time job. I appreciate the little things, like going to the charity shop and watching him pick out a pair of jeans. All these things seem so normal to most people but they're new for us.
To see the transformation from where he was two years ago, living on the streets, to where he is today, is truly amazing. Imagine if you had a newborn who was completely helpless and vulnerable and then in two years he went on and got a job. That's the difference.
It's beautiful in one sense - he missed out on so much in my life and now I feel I am able to catch up, but from a maternal stance, even though I am the daughter. I am helping him to get back on his own two feet.
Image copyrightDiana KimImage captionDiana Kim and her father are taking it one step at a time
I make sure I don't place any unrealistic expectations on him. I told him, "Dad, you need to just take your time in life, because you just came out of your own personal war." And he says, "Yeah, I feel like I did."
I showed my father some photographs of him that had been published in a local magazine and he said he liked them. He understood the intention behind them. "These are what I was," he said. "I can look at what I was, and my condition." When I told him I was making a book of photographs his response was, "You'd better finish it."
I've given him a camera that I used to photograph him. He hasn't used it much - taking pictures is quite a solitary activity and he's more interested in being social right now.
Image copyrightDiana Kim
It's a great way of coming full circle - he was a photographer and his passion is something that I picked up on and it's something that brought us together.
I always tell him, "I love you Dad, I'm really proud of you." He enjoys that. He's in a good place now.
Once I asked him how he would describe me. He looked at me and said, "You are a really strong person, Diana, but you have such a soft heart." And that really touched me. Here is a man who I thought, for all these years, wasn't there for me - he didn't raise me, but he knows me.
Image copyrightDiana Kim
All photographs courtesy of Diana Kim - you can read more on her blogThe Homeless Paradise.
