Is academic research really worth all the money that students are unwittingly paying for it? Not according to Larry Zicklin, former chairman of Neuberger Berman, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and a frequent lecturer on ethics at Wharton. In this opinion piece, he points out that if faculty members assumed larger teaching workloads, while doing less research, universities could deliver a college education at a fraction of its present cost. And all that would be lost would be a succession of what he sees as research papers that are of only marginal interest. Zicklin predicts that online education and other free-market forces will most certainly reverse this worrisome situation. He also wonders if students should have a say in how their tuition dollars are spent.

When I read academic literature, all too often by paragraph three I'm lost in a morass of quantitative analysis that is far beyond not only my abilities but those of almost every business person I've ever met. In my view, the authors devote far too much of their time conducting research and writing about it in articles that only their peers understand and too little time actually teaching. As a result, their students are getting progressively less for their money, a guarantee of future serious trouble for higher education. As someone said about the North Pole, when you're there, every direction is down. I happen to think the American university system is on top of the North Pole now and the sides are steep. One solution? Maybe it's time to give our customers, the students, a choice in what they actually want to pay for, and possibly scholarly research isn't it. The value of a free market is, after all, one of the things we teach.

Let me give you an example of the extent to which things are going wrong. A couple of years ago, a valued faculty member who was responsible for a prolific output of financial research at a well-known business school resigned. This caused great distress within the college, as the administration feared that the school's rankings would suffer because it would no longer be associated with his scholarship. But while he was the school's most successful scholar, he certainly didn't teach anything related to his research. How practical was that research anyway? I've worked in the financial area for 50 years and I didn't have a clue as to what his most recent articles were about -- and nor did various business colleagues to whom I showed them. If we couldn't decipher his writings, for whom were they intended? My answer: The community of scholars who write for one another but not for their students and certainly not for business executives who are interested in practical ideas that might actually work.

By way of a second example, a faculty member at another college told me how she was reproached by her co-author for getting behind on their book. She tried to explain her lateness by pointing out the demands of her rigorous teaching load. "Are you kidding me?" the co-author said. "How can you teach that much and still get your work done?" In other words, teaching wasn't her job; research and writing was.