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Why is the skill-building suspect? What part of the content do you find so worthless? At least provide some examples or references to go along with your commen

Why is the skill-building suspect? What part of the content do you find so worthless? At least provide some examples or references to go along with your comment. B

loganfrederick 17y ago
*All my examples are from my own experiences. I currently attend the Ohio State University. While not bad, the most valuable of the MBA classes are those that are case study or project based. The pure textbook classes on accounting, finance, HR, etc. are valuable, but no more valuable than reading books on the subject without paying the tuition fee. While I believe in the case-study method, it's not significantly different than if an engineer-turned-MBA simply started his own firm. The difference between the MBA programs (generally, there are exceptions in areas like finance, logistics/operations, and MAcc for accounting) and Masters in other scientific fields is that in Masters of Science, you're further improving your skills in the field. Many of the MBAs I know are either non-business people taking the opportunity to learn important business skills that could be learned from experience or former business students learning an incremental amount of knowledge for massive tuition fees.
- Brushfire 17y ago
  Thanks. Its interesting to hear other perspectives. I'm at University of Chicago. There are pretty much 3 types of classes here, Case-based, Tool-Based, or Labs. Very few of the professors use textbooks at all, if they do they are purely for reference, not for primary use. Having owned 2 businesses before school, I think you are right that some lessons can be learned through experience. However, this is an asset during discussion because we have a variety of people with a variety of backgrounds adding their experiential knowledge into the discussions - so the value derived is higher than just experiencing it yourself. For example, I have no experience with retail operations or with industrial manufacturing, but some of the lessons they learned the hard way might be useful to me later on as a software startup guy, and some of the lessons I learned during my companies might be useful to them down the road. The other benefit of University of Chicago is that the MBA program does not have a fixed curriculum, so students craft their own program of study (there are some guidelines), and they can choose to study deep in one area (for example, Econometrics or Analytical Finance) or for those with less business experience to go more broad.

Why is the skill-building suspect? What part of the content do you find so worthless? At least provide some examples or references to go along with your comment. B

loganfrederick 17y ago

*All my examples are from my own experiences. I currently attend the Ohio State University. While not bad, the most valuable of the MBA classes are those that are case study or project based. The pure textbook classes on accounting, finance, HR, etc. are valuable, but no more valuable than reading books on the subject without paying the tuition fee. While I believe in the case-study method, it's not significantly different than if an engineer-turned-MBA simply started his own firm. The difference between the MBA programs (generally, there are exceptions in areas like finance, logistics/operations, and MAcc for accounting) and Masters in other scientific fields is that in Masters of Science, you're further improving your skills in the field. Many of the MBAs I know are either non-business people taking the opportunity to learn important business skills that could be learned from experience or former business students learning an incremental amount of knowledge for massive tuition fees.

Brushfire 17y ago
Thanks. Its interesting to hear other perspectives. I'm at University of Chicago. There are pretty much 3 types of classes here, Case-based, Tool-Based, or Labs. Very few of the professors use textbooks at all, if they do they are purely for reference, not for primary use. Having owned 2 businesses before school, I think you are right that some lessons can be learned through experience. However, this is an asset during discussion because we have a variety of people with a variety of backgrounds adding their experiential knowledge into the discussions - so the value derived is higher than just experiencing it yourself. For example, I have no experience with retail operations or with industrial manufacturing, but some of the lessons they learned the hard way might be useful to me later on as a software startup guy, and some of the lessons I learned during my companies might be useful to them down the road. The other benefit of University of Chicago is that the MBA program does not have a fixed curriculum, so students craft their own program of study (there are some guidelines), and they can choose to study deep in one area (for example, Econometrics or Analytical Finance) or for those with less business experience to go more broad.