It's been actually exactly 25 years since I began business studies like you, marketing and management. I started on October 1 of 1990. That's when I began to study. And back then, of course, I had no idea what I will study, what I am supposed to study, or what these studies will... Provide me or give me what kind of opportunities I will have well now I'll try to do that for you Today's lecture will have the following topics first. I'll discuss some foundation courses then business core courses then business business specializations, business extensions, and because I've had over 15 years of teaching experience, education problems, how and why business programs mostly fail around the world.
And then I'll have a short conclusion for you. I understand that I have about 45 to 50 minutes to present this and maybe 15-20 minutes for questions and discussion. Now I did not originally know and I want to make very clear that today I talk about business education and I will talk specifically about global business and global business is very different from global studies global business is a small field of global studies global studies will include politics it will include global or international law, it will include culture, cultural anthropology. Global studies is very big.
I'm focusing first only on business, basic business as business is taught in business schools around the world. So, Where business begin? What is the foundation of business? In other words, what do you need in terms of background in order to begin understanding business?
two areas that you need to understand is quantitative methods. Quantitative methods basically means math and economics. You need to understand basic economics before you can do any business studies.
So, let's a little bit about each. If you're a business student, you want to take basic quantitative methods, and usually we separate these quantitative methods in two subjects or in two areas. The first area is just business math.
This is standard math, which is used mostly in business. There is nothing very special. Mathematics is a broad field, and you're going to study...
only those specific things that are commonly used in business and of course accounting finance in general so that's business math I think you are already or have already taken business math course The second one that you do is business statistics. And business statistics is about analyzing and interpreting data. Usually in the real world you will see a lot of data. Maybe interest rates over many, many years. Maybe exchange rates over many years.
Maybe economic growth. Or if you want to look at economic growth. You may try to relate economic growth to investments or economic growth to consumption or economic growth in the case of Korea with exports.
So statistics will try to tell you basic relationship which is, let's say in the case of Korea, most important for Economic growth of Korea. Is it consumption? Or is it investment? Or is it exports?
You may have many different theories. And you may guess many different things. But with statistics, you can get the data, you can analyze, and you can try to discover relationships.
And based on the data, you can conclude which is more important or which is the most important factor. In other words, in business statistics, have you already studied basic statistics or you will? Have you studied? Already? So basic statistics will tell you these relationships.
Okay. The second foundation before you begin real business studies is economics. Let me see if I have the next slide. And economics is divided into of course over 15 different fields.
You have, let me just read two, microeconomics and labor economics. You have international economics. You have international trade, international finance. You have labor economics. Okay, you have many different fields.
fields in economics. In general, basic economics, which we sometimes call principles of economics or introduction to economics, includes these two fields, microeconomics and macroeconomics. You need these to understand general business. Microeconomics concerns the behavior of individuals, the behavior of groups, the behavior of people, the behavior of people, the behavior of groups, consumers and the behaviors of families. How families get job, their income, how families spend their income, how much they spend on food, how much on cars, how much on housing.
In other words, how families make economic decisions. The economic decisions are about making money and spending money respectively. investing money.
In other words, what you do with your money. So that's microeconomics. The second part of microeconomics is about the businesses.
You look about one business. How the business is managed. Microeconomics tells you how much labor, how much workers to employ, how much capital to employ, possibly, possibly a little bit of how much to buy. borrow.
Then it tells you how much to produce, how to price your product. And in general, the main concern for firms is how to maximize profits. Business is about making money, is about making profits.
And microeconomics focuses on how to make maximum profits, which usually is more than that. boils down to how much to produce and sell and at what price. Macroeconomics is about the general economy. The general economy is about production and output.
We call this GDP, gross domestic production. It's about labor as in employment. We call these jobs.
It's about are there a lot of jobs or a few jobs. Next one is about wages. Are the jobs well paid or poorly paid? Okay.
The next thing is about interest rate. Interest rate is the cost of capital. So macroeconomics concerns about labor and the cost of labor and capital and the cost of capital. Cost. of capital is interest rates.
And macroeconomics is concerned about exports and imports and is concerned about the most important price in the economy. The most important price of the economy is the price of money. We call the price of money exchange rate. How much the Korean currency exchanges for Chinese currency for US dollars, for Japanese yen, or for European euro.
So macroeconomics again is concerned about employment and wages. business outputs in business prices in other words business profitability about M exports imports and exchange rates this is what macroeconomics is all about so these are the foundations before you need to specialize further into business this is the background next next if you study or when you study business you study for main areas we can also call them for main fields the or for main subjects. The four fields are accounting, finance, marketing, and management. And I'll discuss each one of these now. Accounting is the The language of business is translating business activity into numbers so that numbers can everyone understand.
The trick in accounting is that you, as Koreans, can read the European business accounts and you can interpret and understand them. For me, having studied in the US and come from Bulgaria, can read Korean accounting statements and understand what they mean and how we interpret them. So let's talk about each of these. Accounting is separated sometimes they call it principles of accounting sometimes they call it introduction to accounting.
The accounting field is generally separated in two main sub areas. First one is called financial accounting, the second one is called managerial accounting. You need to learn and understand both. This is the first foundation for every business.
Financial accounting is how you make the accounts and how you report them. How you report the accounts, we call these financial statements to the owners of the business, to the government, to investors, to bankers, to creditors. In other words, this is accounting which is designed for people outside the firm and it is highly standardized. We have and now almost the whole world uses what's called international accounting standards. We use them in Bulgaria, they're all used of course in Thailand, they're used in America and everywhere in Europe.
I'm pretty sure you in Korea and I know for sure Japan's using them, China is now introducing them so that the The statements are done here as well as there and everywhere in the world in the same way. You read them the same way, you make them the same way, you interpret them the same way. So that's financial Accounting. It gives you a balance sheet with assets and liabilities.
It gives you an income statement with revenues, expenses, and profits. And it gives you cash flows. How money is coming in and how money is going out.
So that's financial accounting. to serve the needs of management so that management can make decisions. These are going to be internal reports. They're going to be used by the CEO and CFO, the marketing manager, the production manager.
They're going to be used to see what the costs are. What is the cost of a product? How to price a product?
How much to produce? How much supplies to order? It will include budgets, budgets for inventory, budgets for ordering, okay? It will include all of those things. Managerial accounting is accounting for managerial purposes, and managerial purposes is how management makes business decisions inside the firm.
So this is standard accounting for outsiders and this is whatever management needs for decision-making. You need to study accounting First, before you study finance, before you study management, before you study marketing, and before you study any other things except, of course, math. in economics. Okay?
So, you do math and economics first, then the third subject is accounting. You can do financial accounting and possibly maybe you could study marketing or management in parallel. Next is... Finance. And finance focuses on money.
Finance is the subject of managing money. The subject which is commonly taught, and it's usually in all business schools, is called financial management. And financial management is exactly that.
How you manage money. How you manage business money. Sometimes this course is called in many business schools corporate finance.
finance and corporate finance is how you manage money for big corporations in other words if you let's say do accounting oh sorry finance for samsung it's not major corporation you need corporate finance financial management and corporate finance is about 90 percent the same corporate finance has stuff specific to big corporations You generally need financial management. And financial management is how you manage the assets of the company, how you manage liabilities of the company, and the most important part is how you manage investments, how you make investments. When you make an investment, you want to make proper calculation to find out is the investment profitable?
or not profitable? What's the return on investment? So, finance is, focus is on investment, but not only. Okay, financial management is about financing.
Financing means how you get money. Do you get it by a bank loan? Do you borrow money from the bank?
Or do you sell bonds? In other words, you borrow money from the bond market or you sell stock, which is you raise money from investors. There's certain optimal ratios.
It's not good to take too much debt and have very little capital, but it's not a good idea to have too much capital and very little debt. There is some optimum, some balance. So financial management.
will do this for you. Some business schools will usually have only one financial management course, but most business schools will have two financial management courses. Sometimes there are smaller, call them fundamentals of financial management, which cover maybe 15 or 16 chapters. If the school is very good and very hard, They'll cover all 15 chapters in one semester in 15 weeks and it's hard but they keep doing it. Most business schools around the world, I mean most students, cannot handle 15 chapters in 15 weeks.
So usually financial management they cover in the first semester eight chapters, the first eight, and in the second semester they cover the other. Eight chapters. It's a little bit easier. So the big subject is separated in part one and part two.
And finance is about, again, investments. Next one is marketing. Marketing again is about the customer.
What the customer wants. What the customer is willing to pay. Okay.
Marketing is about the product. What the customer wants. Again, what product they want.
Do they want a big screen or they want a small screen? Do they want a heavy mobile with a large back? battery or they want it very slim very light but battery life is no good what the customer wants that's the product the next thing is price how do we price it okay if it's sim let's say to Apple iPhone do we price it above do we price it below do we price it at Apple iPhone in other words you need to think about the competition So you need to think about your customer, the product, the features of the product, the price. You need to think about the competitors, what the competitors are offering. You also need to think about service, customer service.
That's very important, especially for some customers, especially for customers of products that you need a lot of service, like cars. Cars need a lot of service. service.
Maybe phones don't need so much service anymore. So this is all marketing. Sometimes marketing is one huge textbook and it just go half and half. Sometimes marketing too is usually separated out as Advertising.
Now from the previous screen, I think I forgot, sometimes financial management 2 is separated out as a separate course called Investments. So instead of 2, you get Investments. For marketing, instead of marketing 2, they just call it advertising. And you learn all the tricks about advertising.
Advertising is about making the customer to like, to want. and to eventually buy your product. Okay? Again, it's about advertising campaigns and promotions and all the other things that will make the customer buy your product.
So, that's what marketing is about. And next one is management. Not necessarily the last one.
Management, again, is about how businesses make decisions. Decisions are about planning. How do we plan?
plan, how much we're going to produce, how much we're going to order, how many people we will need. The management of people has got a special name, it's called personnel management, it's considered very important. And usually instead of having management two, they'll separate and have a whole subject called personnel management. Management is, let me repeat, about planning. It's also about organizing.
How we're going to organize. What departments we're going to have. We're going to have marketing department, and finance department, and accounting department, and a production department, and a personnel department. department and a legal department and IT or computer technology department.
So, what kind of departments we're going to have? Management is about leadership. How to lead people, how to manage people, how to organize people. One of the most important part in businesses is how to motivate people. And of course, how to reward people, what kind of salaries, what kind of vacations you're going to give them and all the other things, whatever is necessary.
And finally, management is about control. Are you going to put a camera and watch the people? Are they going to have a card?
Every time they walk in, they slide their card. In other words, you keep track of their time. Are they going to give you weekly reports, monthly reports, annual reports? In other words, how you control, how you make sure that you achieve your goals, how you make sure that employees do their job appropriately. That's what management is about.
In these four fields, accounting, finance, marketing, and management, consists the core. Once you got the core, the main education. Oh, there's one more. Once you get the core, the big, once you get the core, the capstone, the most important, the most difficult course, the course that requires understanding all the other four, understanding accounting and finance and marketing. End management is called strategic management.
Strategic management is how you compete. Are you gonna compete on efficiency? Are you gonna compete on price?
Are you gonna compete on a better product? Are they going to compete on a variety of products? You know, the basic thing that you can think, the simplest and easiest that you can understand is how Samsung Galaxy will compete against iPhone.
It's going to be bigger screen, Better battery battery whatever the field is going to be a different operating system more free software in other words How you? Compete it's also how you? Innovate how you innovate your products, okay?
So all of this is called a capstone capstone means the top means the most important the one which builds on all the others. That's the capstone course. And let's see, specializations.
Once you have your core, you can specialize, and there are four primary specializations. You can specialize in accounting, and those that specialize in accounting are simply going to take four or five or six more accounting courses. In other words, you take the basics of accounting, finance, marketing, management, and then you focus on accounting.
You're going to do, after introductory accounting, you're going to do intermediate accounting. Intermediate accounting is hard. The textbook is fat, like 1,500 pages. It's a killer, okay? That's why accounting people get or make a lot of money.
It's very hard. A lot of accounting majors just fail on intermediate accounting. So they take it year-long, two semesters.
After they do accounting, sorry, intermediate financial accounting, they'll do cost accounting and cost accounting will go in a lot more detail of managerial accounting how we determine costs and all the other tricks related to the cost inside the business in other words business is about revenues and expenses cost accounting focuses on the expenses only that's it you'll do some auditing auditing is trying to check and verify if your If your accounting is good, is proper, is correct. If there is cheating, if there is fraud, if someone is stealing money, okay, or if someone is called cooking the books. In other words, they are lying and cheating, trying to mislead you, whether it's the management or external people. So that's what auditing is.
And of course, you have non-profit institutions. you have also government institutions government accounting is a little difference nonprofit institutions are also a little bit different they're not run for profit so there have a separate accounting of their own and just not to mislead you there may be more one two three four more courses but if you take business and you have a field usually four or five extra courses are enough to to have the field. Similar with finance, you can take financial management too. Or you can do investments. Or you can do financial economics and learn about financial markets, financial institutions, financial instruments.
You have separate ones called financial derivatives. This is very advanced, very difficult, very sophisticated. And you may have a separate course about that if you specialize in finance. And of course, risk management.
How you manage your financial risks or operations and production risks. Risk management includes a subfield of insurance. If you're a big business, how you ensure your different risk.
risks? Well, first of all, which are your risks? You need to know your risk, you need to understand your risk, you need to measure them, and the last piece, you need to manage them or insure them.
With marketing, again, you may have many different courses. You can specialize in advertising, take a separate course on advertising. You can get a separate course on sales, okay?
A lot of people in marketing, they just do sales, like a car salesman or phone salesman or whatever. you're selling. Okay? It could be product design. How do we make it better?
How do we make it more user-friendly? What do they like? You know, that's product design.
And of course, marketing management. How you manage. the marketing operations and there could be a bunch of other marketing causes and with management first how we manage people it's called personnel management how we manage inventory called inventory management how we manage the marketing marketing management very popular course is supply chain management how you manage the supply chain there is another course sometimes in here sometimes a separate course called operations management how you manage your business operations whatever you're doing okay you may be managing a hotel or a restaurant or a car manufacturer and of course any other management. So to summarize business specializations these are the four main the four primary specializations after you've done your core you take four or five of these within one specific area and then you specialize in those.
There is an alternative specialization which is instead of accounting business, specializing, you could be specializing in international business, right? This is what you're, I understand, doing. And there is no difference between saying international business and global business.
International and global means the same. So, if you're studying In your case, maybe a global business. What do I think is a good global business education? How do we structure it? Well, very simple.
You will have or should have a course. in international economics. In other words, the first course we had microeconomics and macroeconomics. Now you're going to get international trade and international finance. So international economics.
deals with international trade and finance, a subject which is very important for export-oriented country like Korea. Again, the next course is accounting. You're going to get a specialization, international accounting.
How you do accounting for, we call this global accounting, accounting for a company that has global operations in many different countries. How you take the accounting of five different countries and put it all together. How you deal with currencies and currencies going up and down.
In other words, accounting for global corporations is a little trickier and you learn those tricks here. Similarly, you take a finance and finance for global corporations, we call these multinational corporations, has its own tricks, has its own complications. You just call it international.
finance okay or how you manage the finances of multinational corporations similarly with marketing in other words you take each of the four core courses, accounting and you do international accounting, finance, you do international finance, marketing, you do international marketing, and management, you do international management. And I would think, maybe not necessary, but it's nice, it's very good, and it's very helpful if you do an extra course, international law. If you're doing business, understanding at least some law is helpful, is nice, it's important. So, this is my view of how I would structure an international business program. Of course, you can add more courses, international politics and all sorts of other things, but this is the basics.
Now, what other extensions you may have? In other words, you've done your core, you've done your specialization, but if you want to get a little further, and there is usually time in a business school, you may study some programming languages. Especially important is to learn at least one statistical...
programming language. In other words, you have many statistical softwares and the statistical software usually have a basic, not basic, meaning some simple programming language so that you can learn how to program statistical software. So learning some programming languages is very helpful, especially statistical type languages.
There are many statistical packages, maybe one or two of those is helpful. Next, database systems. It always helps to know and understand databases. Information is what you need to manage and make decisions. And information is usually stored in databases.
So understanding databases and database systems is always helpful. Helpful. Not necessary, but it's a good idea.
Well, one way that it's done, or another little broader subject, which is usually done in most business schools in the world, is called MIS, Management Information Systems. And part of information system will include, of course, database systems, but it will include security, connectivity. It's going to include whatever is... related to technology and technology being used in businesses.
It's a fairly helpful course to have. And as a separate, you may have web systems or internet systems, how to use the internet for marketing management or whatever the things are that you may do. course in general I'm talking about also general languages whether it's English which is today the language of all business around the world and of course tourism now the rising star is Chinese Japanese has been always popular and possibly Arabic which is more exotic. So these are business extensions. You may have a business extension in law.
You may study a little bit further law like introduction to law. It's nice to have. It's also very nice to have business law. Again, it's not part of the of the core but it's a nice extension you may have specifically contract law how to make and manage contracts this one is tricky because contract law in japan is going to be different from korea different from China, different from Bulgaria, different from America.
So contract law is not the same around the world. And maybe some international law. So you may extend into the area of law. So I'm trying now to summarize.
I've already discussed all of these things. This is a simple table that you're having. You may have within the field, so you're gonna have, let's say, for an international business what would you at least study as a basics well for quantitative stuff business math and statistics maybe you can take a third course maybe not maybe you can take statistical packages and statistics programming is number three.
It's not on there. Next for economics. Microeconomics, macroeconomics and international economics which includes international finance and trade. Accounting, financial accounting, managerial accounting and international or global accounting.
I'm just putting it all together. This is just the same information in one table for convenience. Finance.
Financial management, maybe financial management 2 or investments, international finance. Marketing 1, maybe advertising or marketing 2, international marketing. Management, management 1, personnel management, international management. And possibly for others, you may include some MIS or maybe business law or maybe international law. That's again the core.
You can extend in different ways up to your choices or up to the goals of the university or the goals of the administration. Let's see what else we have. I should be...
Ah, okay, that's my last section. Well, I've been teaching both business and economics for about 15 years in eight different countries. And I've seen a lot of programs fail or a lot of programs aren't doing very well.
A lot of programs are mediocre. Of course, some programs succeed. So what are the typical problems? What really...
You have to be careful about or watch about or what are the common mistakes? number one It's very simple. Weak foundations. They study a lot of business, but they don't know basic accounting.
Well, they somehow study accounting, but don't learn anything about accounting. Okay? That's the most common mistake. They study accounting to actually pass the exam. They pass the exam, and they forgot about it.
This is known in education as the toilet flush. You know it's a toilet, right? You know what's a flush? Students study, study, study, study, learn. When the exam comes, they pass, they flush, and everything goes down the toilet, and they forget everything.
Don't remember anything anymore. Okay, so weak foundations. They don't understand basic finance. That's very common. They just say, oh, I'm a marketing guy.
I don't need to know finance, and that's a very common mentality. mistake of thinking, culture, and mentality, especially of an 18 or 19 year old kid. When you're 30, say, oh, I should have learned better accounting. I should have learned better finance. So don't underestimate the foundations.
That's the first one. The second common mistake and that's very common, I've seen it everywhere, is many fancy chords. Fancy chords is a chord which sounds very nice, it sounds very modern, it's got a little bit of a contact, contact, but it's not big enough it's not broad enough they just teach you a little bit about this and that's it like promotion strategies and that's a whole course well that stuff you study for a week or two so instead of another let me emphasize focusing on the foundations in the core they provide a lot of little courses that only look at a few things The third one, which I've seen a lot, and I mean a lot, almost everywhere, is few course chapters.
They study accounting and they study five chapters. Well, five chapters is not enough. Studying five chapters, you're not going to learn a lot of accounting. You're going to learn some, but it's little. When I was studying at one university and we teach finance, students study four chapters in financial management in one semester.
And then four chapters in the next semester. Well, how far are you going to go? So they have financial management one, two, three, and four. And for two years, they study one textbook that has 16 chapters.
Well, that's not exactly good education, where a textbook that is taught in one or two semesters, you spread over four semesters. You need to cover, on average, about 10 chapters per semester, whether it's marketing, management, accounting. Good universities will typically cover 15, and bad universities will cover six or more.
or seven. But teaching or studying three, four, or five chapters is a joke. And that's very common around the world.
The next one which I've seen is too many projects. It's like the marketing teacher loves to give students a project, right? So it gives them a project. But management teacher also gives them a project.
Oh, and the finance teacher gives them a project. And suddenly, every teacher gives them a project, and the students are like, I have five, five projects. And they're doing the project, they copy the project, and they forgot what they're about. And they forgot that they got to. actually sit and learn and understand so the learning is not very important it's about make the project deliver the project and of course with the projects come presentations and students focus on 10-minute presentation so the whole semester they study to make a 10-minute presentation all right on the project instead of Learning all the important stuff.
So that's actually not fault for the students. That's fault for the teachers in the department in general. That's fault of the organization.
Same thing. Heavily weighted projects. Heavily weighted project means the project is 50% of the grade. And again, when it's 50%, do you have similar courses now here? You got a course and half of the grade.
grade is on the project. Well, when half the grade is on the project, the students focus on the project and they ignore the other stuff. If you get the project well and you make your presentation, you're going to get most of your grade. You don't have to study the rest. Well, that's a common design problem.
Well, it's actually designed to make students pass quickly and easily. And students pass, and they get good grades. But they don't learn much.
It's not about learning. It's about passing the grades and making it easy for students. Well, easy is not necessarily good.
Let me see what else. Yes, same thing. Poor and easy exams. Again, this is... mostly fault of the professors.
And of course the last one is everyone's passing. Nobody's failing. If you know that you're not going to fail because we don't fail anybody, the result is you don't study much.
Let's see what else because I'm running out of time. Okay. These are very quickly.
Maybe you use some. Maybe you use many of these. The most common one is called memorizing. You sit and you memorize right before the exam. the night before the exam you do this now in Thailand they don't study the night before the exam they studied the morning before the exam so the exam is 11 o'clock they study 9 and 10 o'clock quickly and they come on the exam you You don't learn a lot by memorizing and cramming.
Usually, whatever you learn by the afternoon, it's all forgotten. Okay? The next one is study from PowerPoint.
Very common. Students love PowerPoint. And then they just read the PowerPoint and study. You cannot get education from PowerPoint. PowerPoint is not meant for study.
PowerPoint is meant for study. presentation to make a presentation easier but you can't study you can't get an education from PowerPoint. Of course not reading the textbook. Most students around the world especially in poor, meaning low quality business programs they don't read the textbook. Well if you want to learn you gotta read.
It's simple as that. The only way to learn is with good reading. You need to train your skills.
to read, to analyze, and all the other things. You're just thinking, oh, if I listen to the lecture, if I take notes. No, you need to read the book. Not enough exercises. This applies mainly for accounting.
Accounting needs exercises. For each chapter, you need to solve five or ten problems, okay? Very important.
Next one is big group exercises. They give you an exercise and they put six people on the group. What happens is one student works and the other one play the phone or chatting or talking or, you know, that's a group. should be two people at maximum three.
Four or more is usually one or two of the students don't really work that much. And that's the same thing as group free writing. Free writing is you're the benefit without doing the work so for example the four of you work on the same project and maybe two or three work hard and one of you don't work hard okay of course too much fun too much party that's already known too much internet too much Facebook too much chatting okay so now I'm asking my students in Thailand how much time you spend on average on Facebook four hours hours. Well, when do you study?
Well, they don't have much, oh, I don't have a lot of time to study, okay? So, too much fun. And another one, study for grades only.
You study just to get A. Well, you don't need that. Grades is not as important.
It's the knowledge. It's understanding the business. And finally, I've seen it a lot.
I don't know why. but it's a problem more of an Asian phenomenon as opposed to European or American kids go to business because mom and dad think it's a good idea so Mom and dad want you to study business, you go and study business to make parents happy. Maybe you don't care about business, maybe you like, I don't know, drawing or painting or photography or art or history or something else you like, but you don't care about business. go to study what you like you study what your parents want you to study so this makes for poor motivation students are not motivated well let me try and finish if I can all right conclusion business study is general not easy people think it's easy but it's not There are too many business programs everywhere around the world and the field is competitive and maybe in Korea there are more than 100 business programs in general.
I mean I know in Thailand there are 100, I know in Taiwan there are 100. So you got to be good because if you're not good, someone else will be and will have a job for you. And a lot of times students underestimate reality. Oh, if I just want a little bit of marketing, I'm okay.
Well, short answer is... you're probably not gonna be okay. So most students fail, meaning they graduate, they didn't learn much, and what they do? They go for a master's degree.
Okay? Okay, just waste more time. Next one.
Most students, when they graduate, they can't get a job, meaning they can't get a good, well-paying job. Yes, they get a job and they become a bartender. They get a job and become a secretary.
But again, do you study for four years in business to be a secretary or to be a bartender or to be a waiter? Okay. Or to be a hotel receptionist?
And the answer is no, you don't study four years for that. But that's what most people do. And I've heard it and I've been in many countries the same thing. Oh, there are no jobs.
There are no jobs when we graduate. And I heard especially this in Bahrain. They say, oh, there are no jobs.
Doesn't matter what. And the short answer is no, there are plenty of jobs, but the jobs are only for the skilled people. So it turns out that, especially when I was teaching in Bahrain, but in other places, for the good students, let's say I have a class of 50, maybe 6 or 7 will be top students.
These 6 or 7s will already get a good, well-paying job waiting for them, and the others don't have a job at all. In other words, for the good students, there are always good, well-paying jobs. And for the poor students, there are simply no jobs.
And I would like to conclude by wishing you good luck in your business education. And we have a little bit of time if you have any questions. Maybe you have some questions.
Please don't be shy. Don't worry if you have any questions or concerns or you're curious about something. Please don't hesitate to ask.
Yes? What do you think is the most different thing between good student and bad student? Oh, it's very simple. Good students study regularly, consistently, throughout the semester.
And the good student reads the textbook and, of course, pays attention. And the best student just... The bad student, they just come to class, they do quickly, they prepare before the exam.
And of course, the big difference is what they remember two weeks after the exam. Two weeks after the exam, the good student remembers most of the stuff and the bad student doesn't. The other big difference is good students try to understand and bad students just memorize.
That's primary differences. More questions? On the back, in this area, I haven't been able to actually spend and look at you. Any questions? No?
Yeah, that's very common here, especially in Asia. Students don't ask questions. They just sit quietly.
Well, if you got a question, you got to learn to ask. You got to learn to ask questions. You got to learn to be active.
You got to learn to be proactive. You got to be curious. Any other questions?
Yes, please. First, we don't know which thing is the important thing and which is not important thing. So, I think memorizing is the... No, the short answer is definitely not. We've done this long time ago.
Memorization was the way of education of the West 2,000 years ago. We did that 2,000 years ago. We did it for many hundreds of years and we know that it doesn't work as well. Okay?
And again, If you don't know what's important, you got two things. First, you think to find out what's important. But if you can't, you ask the professor.
That's what the professor's job is, to tell you what is more important. and to tell you what is less important. That's what you ask the teacher.
Hey, which are the most important things that I need to learn? Just memorizing is very common, but doesn't help you much. You just pass the exam, but next time doesn't help so much.
That's a very common distinction between Western students and Eastern students. Again, we've had universities 2,000 years ago, 1,000 years ago. For thousands of years, we have this experience, and we know what works and what doesn't work. Back in the old days, we had a discussion with the dean. Universities in the West were established at...
The library. Whenever you have a library, you make a university. Because university is based on books and is based on reading books.
That's how you get education. More questions? You have a third chance. Alright, another one. Want to ask questions?
No? Okay, well, thank you very much.