While preparing for their book, Rethinking the MBA, Srikant Data, David Garvin, and Patrick Cullen (all researchers from Harvard) polled a number of b-school deans, corporate recruiters, and business executives to find suprising results: MBA graduates are lacking in soft skills. Particularly the ability to communication.

“Even the students we hire from the best schools can’t communicate,” one recruiter observed. Another said: “Communication skills are poor, and without them you cannot lead.” Even more surprisingly, deans were equally scathing. “The ability to communicate is lacking. Students don’t know how to present in front of groups nor how to express their concerns in a frank but non-aggressive way,” one dean said.

The reasoning behind this may be due to the fact that traditional MBA are taught by not by business practitioners, but by academics who focus on theory and hard skills such as finance, accounting, and supply chain management with little emphasis on communication and presentation skills.

Many school have taken measures to counter this problem by increasing their program’s communication training. Some have created new classes, some have even gone so far as to include mandatory humanities (think sociology or philosophy) training in their program. But this could also mean good news for Liberal Arts and Humanities grads considering an MBA as those disciplines already focus more on training the soft skills of verbal and written communication as well as problems solving. If you have those skills down, MBA programs are looking for you! All you’ll need to do is ace your GMAT.