I meant the former, but the later is also true. Though even great the MBA programs only take students with good work experience. However, it's not impossible to

I meant the former, but the later is also true. Though even great the MBA programs only take students with good work experience. However, it's not impossible to change industries--e.x. bankers going into consulting. It's hard to tell how much value the MBA actually adds. It's hard to tell if they are just selecting the best and brightest, or if they actually teach something worthwhile. I suspect it's a mixture of both. I took a couple MBA courses at Kellogg when I was at Northwestern in another grad program. The ones I took weren't real project work loads, but the courses delved into case studies of what companies did wrong and right during critical points in their history. Students would use real world experiences from their past to explain things. I took an IP asset management class with one of guys who sued Zuckerberg for allegedly ripping off HarvardConnect to make Facebook. Unfortunately he never talked about it. I was very curious. Another large value of an elite MBA is the networking. How many billions of VC bucks have been dolled out to MBA grads at Stanford by people they met there? In fact, the whole idea of an MBA program is somewhat similar to what YCombinator does.