Proceedings of 7th Annual American Business Research Conference
23 - 24 July 2015, Sheraton LaGuardia East Hotel, New York, USA, ISBN: 978-1-922069-79-5
Business Education in the Twenty First Century with a Nineteenth
Century Thinking
Econ. Javier Landívar V, MSc.*
The third world countries are confident that the magic formula for development is
education, and probably most academics will agree to that statement, but the experience
of Ecuador, an underdeveloped country that apply that formula as a development policy,
reveals that there are many other aspects that have to be study and solve in order to
accomplish produce as many entrepreneurs as the country requires for getting out of
poverty. This paper test the hypothesis that even though there have been a billionaire
investment in education, the mentality of the students have not changed, they still prefer
to be employees, rather than take minimum risk to improve their quality of life, creating
jobs and income for the country. This study is based in statistics of the last decade (20042014) of students that graduate from business administration & entrepreneurship degree
and what are they doing now. The results show that at least three quarters of the last
graduates are unemployed, underemployed or working for companies in other areas not
corresponding to their major, this suggests that if the country is not developing startup
companies or expanding the existing ones fast enough the future is not promising, and
the strategy should be revised and improved, otherwise Ecuador is still producing more
employees for an already saturated market.
JEL Codes: I21, I38, L26, M13
Name of the track: Business Education
*Econ. Javier Landívar V, MSc.; Facultad de Ciencias Administrativas, Universidad de Guayaquil, Ecuador. Faculty of
Management – University of Guayaquil, Cdla. El Paraiso, Mz. F Villa 19 PA, Guayaquil – Ecuador,
landivarjavier@hotmail.com, javier.landivarve@ug.edu.ec, Telephone number:+593(4)2221-254 (Home Phone),
+593(9)8723-1562 (Mobile Phone)