21 ms·

M.B.A. Applications Decline at Harvard, Wharton, Other Elite Schools

260 points by tysone 8y ago

fermienrico 8y ago
In engineering circles (coworkers), there is a general theme I notice of looking down on people with MBAs. I dismiss it as “us vs. them” or “technical vs managerial” fight. But, could someone who has a MBA shed some light with an objective view of MBA? Why shouldn’t I get one? Why should I get one?
- canadapups 8y ago
  I have an undergrad finance degree + finance career. I also run a website I built my self as a side project (see profile if curious). For a while after learning to code, I thought my business degree was useless. My coding skills felt so empowering compared to my finance/business skills. I can create with coding... learn and do. A car mechanics certificate felt more useful than a business degree. Over this period of introspection, I started paying attention to whenever my business/finance knowledge was actually useful. I very quickly realized that very smart people often have very little knowledge of finance and business. Business knowledge that I assumed as common sense (due to being surrounded by other finance people) is completely enlightening to others. With a business degree you learn how the world works, which is very important to anyone who wants to be entrepreneurial.
  - sjg007 8y ago
    So how does the world work then?
  - fermienrico 8y ago
    “Very smart people often have very little knowledge of finance and business.” This I found to be a glib generalization. What is so intrinsic about business knowledge that cannot be learned through studying and experience? Say compared to learning how compilers work and building one?
    - canadapups 8y ago
      I never said it can't be learnt. Business knowledge can be learnt through study and experience. For example, taking a MBA degree is one way. Many people who spent lots of time learning and building compilers haven't put the time to study or have the experience in business... which can make a MBA degree useful for them.
      - fermienrico 8y ago
        Then I think it has nothing to do with being “Smart”. I could say the same thing about business people - they have no idea how to write a compiler. I’m simply alluding to your statement that refers to “smart people” and their lack of business knowledge.
        spyhi 8y ago
        I think you're misunderstanding what he's trying to say. He's not saying that knowing finance has anything to do with being smart--if anything, it's the opposite: Of the people he considers smart, he noticed knowledge of finance isn't widespread. Perhaps the average smart person doesn't find the problem interesting enough. For what it's worth, I was one of those people. I didn't go for my undergrad until 8 years into my adult life (I'm a veteran), but I had done extensive reading about business to the point that most of my BBA (which I was taking as a bonus alongside CS) felt like review. Except for finance. I knew the basics, but even undergrad courses revealed that my knowledge was very shallow. I think it's just something that people don't expect to have that much complexity. I wouldn't have thought to learn it if I hadn't been forced to take it in school, but I took as many finance courses as I could once I realized the knowledge deficit. Is finance hard? The sophisticated stuff can be, but generally in comparison to engineering it's not. But nonetheless, nearly none of the computer scientists in my class or in my professional circles have bothered to learn...probably because they're more interested in compilers ;)
        fermienrico 8y ago
        Quoting "I very quickly realized that very smart people often have very little knowledge of finance and business." Can you defend this statement? I don't think I am misunderstanding what he is trying to say. This statement makes no sense to me.
  - sp527 8y ago
    The insinuation that the valuable aspects of a business education can't be picked up by a reasonably smart and motivated person is pure hoohah. For instance, I'm willing to bet the information in a combination of 'Lean Analytics' and 'High Output Management' would exceed the value of an entire MBA curriculum (which is anyway mostly focused on dealing with big company problems). The network is harder to replicate, but again not impossible. Someone who feels motivated to figure it out can do so.
    - jacques_chester 8y ago
      I don't think there's any insinuation. > For instance, I'm willing to bet the information in a combination of 'Lean Analytics' and 'High Output Management' would exceed the value of an entire MBA curriculum (which is anyway mostly focused on dealing with big company problems). That's a common cliché, but it's only partly true. There are problems that only occur at large scale (complex mergers, fancy legal structures, sophisticated financing). But the fundamental problems are all the same at every size. You need to manage cashflow, you need customers to become aware of the product or service and buy it, you need to be able to do things at a lower cost than your selling price, you need to keep proper records, pay wages, pay taxes, pay debts, manage inventory. These are universal problems of business. A whale has problems that a dolphin does not. But they both breathe, both pump blood, both eat and digest and move of their own volition. I feel there's often value in humbling yourself before another profession and seeing what you can learn.
      - sp527 8y ago
        > You need to manage cashflow, you need customers to become aware of the product or service and buy it, you need to be able to do things at a lower cost than your selling price, you need to keep proper records, pay wages, pay taxes, pay debts, manage inventory. Half these things take under a few days to learn sufficiently for any business with ARR under ~$1M. And you can anyway hire people to fill in the gaps in your own knowledge for basically peanuts. And there's no MBA program that will teach you strategies that are especially useful in reaching customers - if there was a professor who really could teach that, (s)he'd be monetizing that skillset instead. All this depends on your goals. I want to make that very clear. There is almost no value to an MBA for someone intending to build something from the ground up. There is potentially tremendous value for someone looking to have a career in business at larger companies.
- ucaetano 8y ago
  Computer Engineer by education here, I posted about it a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209768 Pasting it here: I went for it mostly to switch industries and geographies, as well as for the "learning" part, which I just find fun. It worked really well for me, but I had clear expected outcomes. The marginal value of an MBA degree is diminishing as the knowledge is easily available anywhere, but there are a few things which still count: - Network: unlike an usual MSc or PhD, an MBA class has 100's of people, and you spend a lot of time with them, building a very solid network - Switching functions or industry: it gives you a very good starting point. If you're an engineer, it will be hard to switch straight into marketing, PM, finance, etc. Doing an MBA, plus a summer internship in your target function will make a huge difference. - Switching geographies: the job marketplace for new MBA grads is global (visa issues in some countries aside), and salaries are usually similar globally, so it's a nice opportunity to chose where you to live moving forward - You're being sponsored: just do it, seriously, don't even think about it On the learning side, even if you can find all the stuff online, it makes a huge difference to discuss implications face to face with some brilliant professors. Here's the top stuff I learned: * How to constantly assess your own decision biases and compensate for it * Lot's of game theory and strategy applied to real world * Negotiations * You're not gonna beat the market, so don't even bother * How power is created and traded inside organizations Why should you get one? Because a lot of that knowledge and skills you don't learn just by reading a book. It takes a lot of experience, experience sharing, cases, games and so on. Sadly, the enormous majority of engineers and product managers I meet are completely ignorant of basic product economics, business and finance basics, competitive strategy, etc. (Unsurprisingly, they don't consider themselves to be ignorant on those subjects, quite the opposite).
  - denzil_correa 8y ago
    > Sadly, the enormous majority of engineers and product managers I meet are completely ignorant of basic product economics, business and finance basics, competitive strategy, etc. (Unsurprisingly, they don't consider themselves to be ignorant on those subjects, quite the opposite). One could the same the same about MBAs. A lot of them are quite ignorant about engineering and scientific basics. But, we don't ask managers to get engineering and PhD degrees. So may be, we need value different areas of expertise and learn to work together. I hope an MBA degree teaches some aspects of it.
- bmpafa 8y ago
  got my MBA, _then_ learned to code while trying to build a startup, so became 'technical' and 'managerial' at about the same time. I think my MBA taught me how to view the business at a systems level. When you consider the various financial and performance metrics that managers look at, a business is just another engineering problem. w/o the MBA, I'm not sure when I would've learned that way of thinking.
- georgeecollins 8y ago
  There is often a thing where engineers have issues with general managers, particularly non-technical ones. I don't think the degree has much to do with it. The best thing about an MBA is that you will learn about a variety of disciplines: finance and accounting, marketing, information technology, statistics, operations, economics, public relations, business strategy. You won't become expert in any of those fields but at a good school you will get to know classmates that are experts in each field. An MBA is a great opportunity to switch direction in your career. The bad thing about an MBA is it takes two years of your life and can be expensive. If you are an attractive candidate tuition is negotiable, so I think the time spent on it is the biggest problem. There is no bar exam for MBAs so be wary of second tier schools or "Executive" (night school) MBAs. They just mean less. No one cares about whether you have an MBA once you are five years into your career, but a very top school always looks good. Bottom line: the degree got too popular, got less valuable as the structure of business has changed since it was conceived, and it makes sense for fewer people to pursue it. Supply and demand, as the taught me :)
- jerf 8y ago
  I would point out that a lot of the techie disdain for "MBAs" isn't at MBAs in general (though there is some of that), but specifically at "Harvard MBAs", the high powered business types that are trained to swoop into a company, assess best how to tear it to bits, sell the pieces, and make a tidy profit for themselves and their paymasters while disrupting the lives of everybody else involved, and possibly the industry as a whole, or perform a variety of other such things that involve offloading all the risk and pain on to the employees while taking the profit and value for themselves. There is a time and a place for such shenanigans but the techies of folklore saw it happen in a lot of bad places in a lot of bad ways. Some of the rest of the disdain for MBAs is that a lot of such courses are aimed at the general public; if you are the type that had a computer science degree in your past, you will find the course to be slow and the coursework to be trivial, and you'll probably quite correctly feel you'd be better off on at least the most direct level (ignoring "networking", etc.) studying it yourself. But I kept my qualification to the speed of the course and the homework carefully; the ideas inside can still be useful and valuable, it's just they'll come at a rather slow pace compared to what you may be used to and wrapped in a lot of BS (to you) coursework.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    I think the bulk of the antipathy is directed toward the Excel/SAS jockeys who blindly use metrics to force an "improvement" in the business without understanding the business they are supposedly skilled at managing. Then there are those who want to make themselves look valuable by instituting change for change's sake.
  - seppin 8y ago
    Engineers think they could do the business part of they "really wanted to", but don't believe MBAs could do their job. They think they are smarter. Also there's a shocking amount of nerds vs jocks BS that still goes on well into adulthood. Some people never get over high school.
    - Jach 8y ago
      To be fair, the startup mythos canon supports this. Many examples of programmers learning the business stuff on the fly as they scale, not out of a sense of "if I wanted to" but "now I need to". The opposite? If there are examples, they're not part of the mythos.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  MBA's typically go into one of three fields: consulting, finance and industry. You'll be exposed mainly to those in industry. An MBA is a generalized exposure to the business world, it gives you a basis in things like Finance, Economics, Accounting, Marketing, Economics, Ops etc. and then it delves into specific subjects as needed. If you don't have a background in any of this, it can be enlightening, to say the least. As an Engineer, learning core Financial/Econ concepts was basically like learning to speak English - it made me embarrassed at how 'illiterate' I was beforehand. Basically, reading the Financial Times goes from 'Chinese' to 'something you can understand'. I'd argue that it's very useful for people to have a broad understanding of these issues as they have increasing levels or responsibility in business. That said, you don't need it, and it can be in many ways limiting for an early entrepreneur because I feel it can get rather academic. It's in a way an 'intellectualization' of business, when in reality, business is about 'doing'. So consulting firms need people who have this breadth of knowledge, moreover, it helps considerably with their reputation. They have very established intakes, career progress etc.. Same can be said in the banking world: you come in, you do this for 2 years, you do your MBA, that gets you into this role, which you do for another 1.5, then you move onto this - etc. This amount of structure is vastly unlike startups. Again, it's arguably unnecessary, but it's baked into the career development cycle. Some very large organizations have those 'required steps' as well - because they have predictability in terms of ops, they sometimes put 'MBA' as a soft or hard requirement for certain things. It's an enlightening experience, and if you go to one of the better schools you meeting exceptional people including other students and profs. At the lesser schools - not so much. And the 'top schools' have guaranteed access to the best brands on earth. If you get an MBA from a top 15 globally, you can pretty much get an interview at a FANG. The benefit for those on an 'MBA specific career path' is measurable, which is about 1/2 of them, but for the other 1/2 it's more intangible. In terms of reputation, either you go to a 'top school' or the name recognition is not worth it, so you have to look at it differently. There are a lot of mediocre MBA's, just like there are a lot of mediocre software developers and UI designers. And an MBA is not a specific professional designation either - so I often feel there is undue slack. That said - there are too many of them out there, a lot of mid and low tier schools saw it as a cash cow and just sold expensive programs to whomever. Engineers (I am one) can be odd, and sometimes I think they are afraid and or devalue things they don't understand - particularly finance and marketing. Which is funny because the world of finance can be as nerdy as Engineering and it's very powerful stuff. I think most Engineers would love finance and Econ once they got going it it. Marketing is more intangible, but I've developed huge respect for those folks as well. The thing about startups is that they almost favour people with their nose to the grind, creating raw outcomes, even those who might be a little economically illiterate: witness the legions of founders who have no clue when it comes to shares, equity, financing instruments etc.. You have to very careful getting an MBA outside of finance or consulting. If you're company sponsors or has a requirement and it's obvious for your career path - then that's an option. If you did a really soft undergrad like 'English' and are having difficulty breaking into business and you know what you want to do - that's an option. But the worst thing that someone can do is just expect that they go there and it's a panacea and a magic entry point to business. It's one of the degrees that really is 'what you decide to make of it'. It's not like JD or Med School where there's in some ways a set system of outcomes.
- jbob2000 8y ago
  If you look at companies after the MBAs join and gain footing, what do they look like? What did Apple look like when Jobs left? What happened to Oracle when all the engineers left? What happened to Star Wars when it was bought by Disney? MBAs find the good value in a company and chop it up and charge you more. Anyone who is going to critisize this, I would just say; don’t miss the forest for the trees! You’re going to say all this stuff about how MBAs write board reports and do financials, blah blah blah. Yes, I know they do this. The end result of these things is what I described above.
- airstrike 8y ago
  I have a top 5 MBA degree that moved me from an $18k / year job in a third-world country to $360k in Manhattan 2 years after graduating. Presumably that's enough to motivate anyone.
  - turnpikecruiser 8y ago
    Well, if that is true, you are the best evidence yet of the value of the degree. https://poetsandquants.com/2018/09/29/whos-hardest-hit-in-this-years-mba-app-slump/ https://poetsandquants.com/2018/09/29/whos-hardest-hit-in-th...
bennyfreshness 8y ago
Just an anecdote of my personal experience, since there's generally a sense of uselessness for MBAs in tech and I held the same view until recently getting an MBA. I was moving from engineering to product management and thought it would help my resume to get an MBA, but I was pleasantly surprised how useful in many other regards the process and learnings were. For sure learning on your own, doing things, building product, is better than structured curriculum. But there's something to be said for being exposed to a broad set of business information. When heads down writing code and building businesses, it's hard to step out and learn this disparate knowledge unless you're forced to by wanting to graduate. Maybe you're more disciplined than I, but in my free time I wouldn't dabble in accounting for instance, just wasn't interested. The forcing function is surprisingly helpful. I'm not claiming it's for everyone, but I got a ton out of my MBA and would recommend. My situation was moving from engineering to product, had full time PM job, trying to start a side business, which now has had significant growth that I attribute a lot to my learnings from the MBA.
- autokad 8y ago
  I am a Data Scientist w/ a MS in computer Science, but many of my CS classmates never become one despite desire to do so, while several of my MBA friends did so with ease (granted it is Wharton). I think an MBA is more useful over a master in CS because many MBA's have great stats programs. In most CS programs you'd have to use up precious elective spots to take those. Also, business intelligence is a huge part of many ds roles. And if you really wanted to take that Machine Learning course in CS, just take it as an elective in your MBA. I'd love to hear what others have to say on the topic
  - wenc 8y ago
    I am a data scientist who spent my early career doing lots of BI work before moving on to my current role (years ago). I don't have an MBA, only a quantitative Ph.D. BI is more related to analytics than DS (broadly defined, DS deals with predictive, while BI deals with descriptive), and typically falls under the purview of data analysts. It also isn't really a prerequisite for DS work. Also, BI is a skill that is easily acquired in industry rather than in school. I don't know if an MBA is necessarily more useful than a MSCS if you want to become a data scientist. On the hiring end, quantitative training is strongly preferred for true DS positions over qualitative. Given a pool of people with quantitative degrees vs MBAs, it is very likely the former will have an advantage. The only exception is if the position isn't truly a DS one; many people advertise data analyst under a DS title to get a broader pool of candidates. It's common practice these days.
WisNorCan 8y ago
Clickbait headline and buried lede. This paragraph summarizes what the primary driver is: > World-wide, the number of M.B.A. applications was flat from 2017, partly because of an increase in students looking to pursue their degrees in Europe and Asia, according to the GMAC survey. Applications surged 8% to schools in Canada and 9% to schools in East and South Asia. Canada surging by 8% is not because schools in Canada are suddenly better than US counterparts. It is because of US policy and rhetoric under Trump. The relative loss of talent wanting to work here will hurt us. Consider that the CEOs of Google and Microsoft are all foreign born holders of MBAs. Edit: removed Elon Musk from MBA list. He studied business as part of his undergrad from Wharton.
- vowelless 8y ago
  > CEOs of Tesla I'm fairly certain this is false. He has an undergraduate degree from Wharton and has expressed multiple times how he prefers to avoid hiring MBAs.
- flexie 8y ago
  Musk doesnt have an MBA. But yes, Google and Microsoft hired MBAs as CEOs when they ceased to innovate at the same rate as before and started to be just ordinary companies defending a monopoly.
  - harshalizee 8y ago
    Both Google and Microsoft CEOs have engineering degrees alongside their MBAs
  - x220 8y ago
    Musk isn't a trend, he's a celebrity-cultural-icon data point.
- dv_dt 8y ago
  A portion of the whole value of an MBA is the networks, and why pay into a network with people within a nation that has an uncertain policy regarding foreign visitors and business people.
ghaff 8y ago
The reasons given in the article make a lot of sense to me. In a generally strong job market (among those likely to attend business school), taking 1 to 2 years off is a tougher sell, Also noted is that students already have more debt on average making taking on more tougher. There are new specialized degrees of various kinds. I also sense, though I don't have specific data, that a lot of jobs that traditionally required an MBA because reasons, no longer do so. It may still be valued but perhaps not to the point of being effectively required.
JDWolf 8y ago
Perhaps increased costs of living and undergrad are taking opportunity away from more people that would be interested.
Synroc 8y ago
While having considered it, for me, unless you are planning to move to Business org, it seems an MS in something technical is more valuable, even in engineering management, or Product Management, just looking at the degrees people at my company have in those positions. Is it the same at other places?
- MrEfficiency 8y ago
  I didnt get my Masters in a specifically technical field. Engineering Management was 60% Industrial Engineering and 40% business. I found 2 classes useful- >Lean Principles- changed my life, I started using Industrial Engineering at home and sharing my findings with the internet. It has been very popular. >Marketing class- 2 lessons, if you are going to put years into a project, do a marketing plan. Also, learned how incredibly important marketing is. Everything else was basically useless. Had a few crazies as professors in my business classes. Engineering classes were not bad, but not helpful. So 2/10 classes were useful? But incredibly useful.
  - spyhi 8y ago
    > Marketing class- 2 lessons, if you are going to put years into a project, do a marketing plan. Also, learned how incredibly important marketing is. This was exactly why I chose to do a BBA alongside my CS degree. If I was gonna make something, I wanted to make sure it would have some impact on the real world. I tell people: CS is a tool for solving problems, but business is a tool for finding them.
- sodafountan 8y ago
  A growing number of people in the company I work at have no degree whatsoever
noMBAplease 8y ago
I went to a Wharton School MBA program introduction the other day. Or maybe it was Berkeley Haas, I can't remember. The lady leading the session to sell me a $150,000+ degree which requires me to leave my (extremely successful and promising career) for two years (and screw up my family life while doing it), started talking about how if people in the room got a bad grade in a certain area for their undergraduate degree - they might have to go back and fix it before they apply. Did I mention I have to pay the costs of this program 100% myself since most employers (and mine) won't cover it anymore? Once I heard that, I was done. Not only do I have to take three months to study for a stupid GMAT or GRE or whatever, I am also being held accountable for a grade I got over 12 years ago. In that 12 years, I quit my business career ,taught myself software engineering, built multiple applications used by millions of people every month before resuming my career as a manager of technical evangelist teams. The idea that I need to go get an MBA, take a GMAT, submit to covering for a bad grade 15 years ago after achieving a very high degree of proficiency in Objective-C and doing the things I have done since was so laughable it ended the desire for me to ever get an MBA. Maybe if they paid me I might consider it. I just dont get it. It is something I might do if I got rich in cryptocurrency and needed a hobby to pass the time, thats about it. Dont get me wrong, people (some) with MBAs I have met are often quite smart. But it seemed like an awful lot of time, stress and money and administrative nonsense for what the result is.
- bluedevil2k 8y ago
  Sounds like you weren't that serious about getting an MBA to begin with. Surely you knew most of what she told you before going into the introduction.
- 0x8BADF00D 8y ago
  I’d argue that you don’t need one, since you’ve already accomplished so much and have a proven track record. An MBA is mainly for people who want to switch careers entirely. Maybe an EMBA would be more appropriate for the stage you are in your career.
- brianwawok 8y ago
  Most working people do executive MBAs. No reason to quit. Did this degree force fulltime?
vinayms 8y ago
Are there any well regarded studies that show that hiring an MBA graduate as a manager benefits the company compared to having an "old school" manager who's only qualification is being clever and shrewd? Or studies that show the opposite?
jotjotzzz 8y ago
Perhaps, in this economy and the rising student debt crises, it's hard to suspend work to go get an education to get a loan and graduate to find a job that may or may not pay enough. I know others are doing part-time MBA's but I cannot see anyone getting into debt to get an MBA if you are in the middle class. I think this is probably due to deteriorating middle class more so than the degree losing luster.
lordnacho 8y ago
So I did a fair bit of an MBA as part of a joint course with Engineering at a well known UK institution. It wasn't literally an MBA, but the MBA there was just one year whereas there was an equivalent amount of time spent at the business school if you chose the right electives. A couple of my classmates went on and got full 2-year MBAs from very prestigious US institutions. The verdict, both from those who went on to do something technical, and those who went on to other things, is that Engineering is harder. It may not pay as well, and it's harder, but it's probably more fun if you find the right job. My friend who is a PE partner wondered what he missed out on, since a girl he knew from Engineering went and joined SpaceX very early on. There were a few stories about people who got into F1 as well. The other part is that you don't actually learn a great deal about business in business school. You won't learn how to make decisions in a strategy class. You won't learn how to invest in a finance class. You might learn some things about the history of thought in the field, eg Taylorism. But generally it is not what it says on the tin. By contrast I built a working radio in my first term as well as a bridge that an adult could stand on. A really big issue, which to their credit they pointed out at business school, is that it might be better for managers to have domain knowledge in what they manage, rather than just be general management "specialists". I happen to fall into this more Teutonic camp. Also, note that very few people that I know report taking an MBA to learn anything. They generally are as cynical as they ought to be about it (!) and did it in order to have better job prospects. It's worked out very nicely for them.
duxup 8y ago
I can't read the article, but I wonder if it is just diluted perception of an MBA. I worked at a company that regularly hired recent MBA graduates, and maybe it was just the school, but I saw little value added to these kids. They got manager type tasks, but showed no skills related to management. Their life experience was so limited that I had to explain it to them that you have to schedule people far ahead of time in order to give them time to schedule their lives, and that you had to schedule them like humans because ... they can't work for 24 straight hours because it would take 5 minutes more to look at the spreadsheet and figure out a more optimal schedule. Beyond internal stuff, even communicating with customer's took hand holding and teaching basic life lessons. I often questioned how the candidates I worked with ever got into an MBA program (I'm guessing it was just open). I wouldn't trust some of them to work at a menial job without a great deal of supervision, let alone make decisions for a business / other people. IMO an MBA just doesn't make sense without significant / proven business life experience for most people. It really was the FedEx commercial IRL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcoDV0dhWPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcoDV0dhWPA Obviously there are people with MBAs with FAR more skills, but with other folks like I experienced I wonder if it has watered down the market for MBAs.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- diminoten 8y ago
  > Their life experience was so limited At what point in their careers did they go get an MBA? My fiancée went to Kellogg and it was a rarity to see anyone there who didn't already have 5+ years of work experience. It was sort of an unspoken (but kind of spoken, since the M7 all highly suggest it) rule.
  - da02 8y ago
    What was her # of years of experience and industry before getting the MBA? (developer? engineer?)
    - diminoten 8y ago
booleandilemma 8y ago
So what are the type of people who went for MBAs now going for?
- diminoten 8y ago
  According to the article, still MBAs but in Canada and Asia.
draw_down 8y ago
It will go back up once all those newly-minted coders realize there's a ceiling on their careers :) (Please note I'm not saying this is a good thing)
sjg007 8y ago
Real estate 101: location, location, location. MBA 101: network, network, network.
- ccozan 8y ago
  Finally someone who gets it. Is about the network. I tried to pursue an EMBA, they advertised everywhere that the alumni are in every big company and because of the closed group communication, was really really easy to reach any CXO because of the school. Otherwise, yes, I declined because of the huge time invest - money wasn't an issue, like being for a month in HK or in Buenos Aires with my class. Interesting, but not really helping.
refurb 8y ago
This isn’t all that surprising. MBA applications went up during the last recession. If you’re working and getting good opportunities and comp, why not keep going? It’s not like you can’t go get an MBA later.
bitxbit 8y ago
MBA is simply not worth it outside of maybe top four or five programs here in the US. I rather see people focus on mastery learning within or outside of traditional graduate settings.
chad_strategic 8y ago
TLDR: I needed an MBA to transition out of career path & then 2008 happened. My interesting journey after getting an MBA: -Received my MBA 2007, just a year before the full blown financial crisis. I needed an MBA to transition out adverting/marketing. -2009-2011 Couldn't find a job. My MBA was in Finance. Taught myself to program financial algorithms. (php/MySql) -2012 Became a coder, programmer, software developer. Made good money programming other people's dumb ideas. No risk, no suits and ties and very few meetings. -2018 Not going to become the CTO at Google or Facebook. Being a Code Monkey is "meh", but I have to work on my own projects at night to be intellectually challenged. Now looking for a job where I can implement programming knowledge while at the same time work more with the business side. There always seems to be a certain lack of communication between the software side and the business side. See my profile if you want to discuss.
Rafuino 8y ago
If you read the article, a lot of the decline is from international applicants. Reading other articles, the drop is primarily about visa concerns for post-MBA employment in the US, and who can blame them? My international classmates had a hell of a time getting work authorization even before our current political situation. This is WSJ clickbait, more or less, and you see why they do this because this topic always rouses the attention of the HN crowd :)
rb808 8y ago
As an aside I wonder if this Kavanaugh thing helps to mean all elite schools lose their luster. I'm not that happy about sending my children to a school filled with entitled preppy douche-bags.
- debacle 8y ago
  What about how Kavanaugh presents himself makes you believe he's an entitled preppy douchebag?
- gravis7777 8y ago
  Typical nonsense liberal response anytime someone starts with money in their life and then continues to work hard to attain their status. Somehow it must have just been handed to them by some secret rich whiteboy freemason organization. No judge at his level, liberal or conservative, hasn't paid their dues.
Dowwie 8y ago
I wrote this as a comment in another post a few days ago but I'll cross-post it here as it is relevant. One of my defining decisions was taking leave and eventually dropping out of a top executive mba program a third of the way in, before I had to take a six figure loan to pay the rest. If I am to be brutally honest with myself, the decision not to finish wasn't entirely my own, but I could have finished. The shit really hit the fan in my life and this forced me to take stock. Had I not been forced, I probably would have continued down the mba path and career change. Losing my father after two very sick years, being laid off by a business in collapse, having a six figure student loan application on my desk, and other crucial "etc" pushed me to reevaluate my life decisions. Here are some important lessons learned: An MBA from a reputable program was leading me into debt servitude and constraints that would shape my career. Debt constraints are major life constraints. Changing careers to do something that was more meaningful can lead to many new opportunities. I left prime brokerage in financial services and was planning to transition into healthcare, hospital cfo type of work. Helping create novel solutions to rising costs of healthcare was a mission I could align myself with. Helping protect investment bank lending to hedge funds through margin financing paid well but served no higher purpose. Healthcare doesn't have a monopoly on purpose, though, and many who work in healthcare do so just to collect a paycheck. I realized I could achieve my goal elsewhere and with fewer bureaucratic constraints, but at a cost-- as an entrepreneur! Entrepreneurship has been everything I expected it to be. I had to become the technical expert I needed as a partner. It's been a long, grueling experience. I am so fortunate to have taken it.
- jackgolding 8y ago
  This resonates with what I consider when making big life choices - choose flexibility over long term commitments (at least outside family.)
AtlasBarfed 8y ago
IIRC accounting is still one of the basics of MBAs. Because what company runs without accounting? Here's a question, what business runs without information systems? Do modern MBAs require understanding of computing basics as they do accounting?
jkw 8y ago
I wish this article would touch upon economic trends' impact on MBA applications. MBA applications go down as the economy performs. The opportunity cost is higher when there are well paying jobs readily available and promotions to be had without needing to go back school. During a recession, MBA applications should go up as work is not as readily available. People also want to retrain their skills to make themselves more marketable to employers, as anyone else would do by going to vocational schools during hard times.
resters 8y ago
I strongly advocate a policy of "No MBAs" in a startup. The last thing a startup needs is someone who has little to no business experience, has a big attitude, has spent the last few years on professional networking and partying, and who expects due to the MBA to be able to boss others around. There are exceptions of course, but in my experience the MBAs want to network to bring in others from their school/program to form a management cabal. It's really bad news. We should also remember that if startups weren't a high status thing to work on these days, all those MBAs would be working for big companies and would have no interest in startups.
- wutangson1 8y ago
  Hmm, sounds like you have some war stories (sorry for the knee jerk pun) from hbs.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
The content of an MBA program is probably useful. The problem is that it became associated with an easy path to a high-earning credential, so it self-selected for people who expect to earn a high wage, who want graduate education to be as easy as possible, and who want credential and status to be the main ways of getting money (instead of, say, working hard to have a skill). The light got shined on this type of program, these credential-seeking roaches scattered, and now they’ll go ruin some other perfectly reasonable academic discipline, most probably data science. I don’t blame the roaches. I guess I blame idiots who buy knowledge products based on credential, and thus either employ these credential roaches at high wages, or else generate the demand that makes it profitable for other consulting / white-shoe sorts of businesses to employ the roaches.
- x220 8y ago
  You are basically criticizing people for wanting money and not wanting to do unnecessary work for it. You might as well criticize human nature. 99% of people pick the best path they can see towards an easier life that gives them the most suitable work/money trade-off they are able to tolerate. If MBA grads aren't good at what they do, that's the fault of MBA programs. MBA grads just want to get credentials and training and make money, just like almost every person in the world. I tend to shy away from personal statements, but your use of "roaches" makes me think that some of what you say bleeds from personal wounds.
  - mlthoughts2018 8y ago
    Criticizing human nature is a good way to improve our behavioral defaults. For example using science instead of burning witches. You seem surprised someone would criticize a bad manifestation of human nature. That puzzles me, given that it’s so historically effective.
    - x220 8y ago
      I'm surprised you're criticizing MBA grads instead of the MBA programs, since the MBA programs aren't teaching effectively while the MBA grads are merely trying to get a better life.
Vaslo 8y ago
I got an MBA from a top 10ish business school and it was probably the best career choice I have ever made. Very technical MBAs (think Carnegie Mellon, MIT, etc) teach way more than business these days and it makes the value skyrocket.
- aliston 8y ago
  How so? Have you remained technical after graduating?
TuringNYC 8y ago
We're 10 years into a bull market. Suppose you apply now, that means you start September 2019 and graduate May 2021. No one knows how the economy will be, but i'd be pretty worried about graduating deep in the trough of a recession.
- otoburb 8y ago
  This reasoning is sound. If one felt an MBA was worth it, probably better to try for a part-time MBA while keeping their current job. The only disadvantage is that many have said the networking and career opportunities are slightly better for full-time MBAs if students wish to shift their careers completely into different sectors. I would say that knowing exactly what one wants from an MBA program, financial situation and risk tolerance, will usually tip the scales in favour of a part-time MBA.
ThomPete 8y ago
Applications to expensive universities, in general, will probably decline over time as the primary reason for attending these schools were the value of the network more than the actual education (it was still great but it's been more and more commoditized) and it seems like a strong network can be created in so many other ways now. Still there are going to be people who will send their kids to expensive schools but the value is going to diminish over time I think.
martin1975 8y ago
Somewhat tangential to the topic, https://personalmba.com/ https://personalmba.com/ teaches you more or less all the book knowledge of a fairly decent MBA program, for an infinitesimal price relative to what you'll pay at an Ivy league or even a state school. What you don't get w/the Personal MBA is the support of your professors, other students, and most importantly the network and recognition ... MBA is really something one should do if they're passionate about people, relationships - e.g. what any solid business is made of.... more so than about just the knowledge or what school they go to.
- jacques_chester 8y ago
  I can't say I agree with your assessment of that book. It read as though the author was utterly enraptured by The Lean Startup (itself a frustrating exercise in padding out a handful of insightful blog posts) and was determined to hang every. single. thing. on that one lamp post.
analog31 8y ago
One thing I've observed is that the MBA degree is valued by people with MBA degrees. This leads to "clusters" of MBA's in the corporate hierarchy. If the path above you contains MBA's, then you might need one yourself in order to advance. On the other hand, if they believe that you have prospects, they might offer to pay for it.
tardo99 8y ago
The same exact thing happened in 1999 and 2000. It's because of the bubble. When it pops, these schools will be extra-competitive for a few years while going through the heaps of applications from failed startups.
neonate 8y ago
http://archive.is/aiqFB http://archive.is/aiqFB
- JacobJans 8y ago
  Is it obvious to anyone else that this is blatant copyright infringement? Does anyone care?
  - cocacola1 8y ago
    Not as it pertains to WSJ. I tried to delete an account I had with them multiple times; utter failures.
  - abenedic 8y ago
    Of course it is obvious, it is just that almost no one online believes that the information contained within is worth enough to subscribe, and there is not a frictionless way to compensate the other the $0.03 cents worth of value I potentially got from the article.
    - organsnyder 8y ago
      Then don't read it. If it's valuable enough to pirate, it's valuable enough to pay for.
      - manicdee 8y ago
        On the flip side, if it’s valuable enough to pirate, the shipping company should have had better security.
        analognoise 8y ago
        I asked that question once, apparently crews aren't armed and it's a big deal to start shooting at people at sea. There are videos of people fending off pirates (actual, sea based pirates) with water hoses. I don't get that - it seems pretty obvious you could arm a crew and fend off some assholes with AK47s (you have the high ground, lots of corridors, time to prepare and can afford some .50's on the deck) - but then again, I'm so American I am practically a Bald Eagle.
shay_ker 8y ago
A lot of the course material from MIT Sloan is online, for free: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/
amb23 8y ago
MBA programs should adjust to the market by developing more concentrated 1-year degrees in specific disciplines: Finance, Operations, Marketing, Product, etc. The first year of most MBAs are just core courses in various business disciplines: you'll learn accounting if you know you want to be a brand manager for a CPG company, or you'll learn org design if you're aiming for a job at a hedge fund. While I see the value in interdisciplinary education--and while I strongly endorse interdisciplinary core courses for undergrad--these courses simply aren't necessary for a professional degree and the extra year of school costs are prohibitively expensive. I'd love to see more concentrated MBAs that really focus on specific disciplines. Basically, cut out the first year of an MBA and just focus on a core set of discipline-specific courses. Most MBA program already have these designed as "concentrations" so I'd imagine the actual implementation of such a program wouldn't be too complex. And if they're only one year long, the price would be halved. I've personally considered, and considered against, an MBA degree due to the prohibitive costs to even apply, but a program like this would make it much easier to swallow that pill.
- otoburb 8y ago
  INSEAD is a highly respected MBA program (outside of the US) that offers a 10 month MBA[1]. This sounds more like what you are referring to, geared towards those with around 6 years of work experience. [1] https://www.insead.edu/master-programmes/mba https://www.insead.edu/master-programmes/mba
epa 8y ago
As prices rise, does demand decrease? :-)
srbl 8y ago
Haven't seen any business school professors chime in yet, so as one I'll do so: Increasingly, what "elite" undergraduate schools offer at the graduate level is less valuable than what research universities offer. The best professors are sequestered in individual labs or in large research universities, not in schools valued for ratings that are focused on undergraduates. The best educations are provided by people who understand learning and make themselves available to assist in the process - nothing about Harvard, Wharton, Tuck, etc. is better suited than University of California, University of Texas, NYU, many other state universities to perform those tasks. Furthermore, and it might deserve an entirely separate post, but many of the best professors in business are being bought up by Asian business schools. I think the net result is the American business school experience is both more valuable in terms of the topics covered and less valuable in terms of the educational experience than it once was.
- Itaxpica 8y ago
  A quick side note - NYU is private (and generally seen as elite at the undergrad level, with the price tag to match), not a state university. The state schools in New York are the SUNY (State University of New York) system outside of the city, and the CUNY (City University of New York) system inside the city.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  "The best professors are sequestered in individual labs or in large research universities" I don't think this applies to most MBA subjects, as least as much as it does the others. It's a highly applied and contemporary discipline, perhaps one of the least theoretical. My best Finance prof, for example, who taught us Private Equity / VC, had personal relationships with so many of the best funds. He spends a lot of time in the field, staying in tune with trends in the industry. He was able to bring in really bright minds from the field, and it always made for the most engaging material. Even advanced corporate finance with all the cases like Volkswagen and their amazing currency trading activities ... it's all very much the real world material.
amrx431 8y ago
Quite opposite to what is happening in India. India's premier business schools like IIMs are seeing a steep increase in candidature.
tabtab 8y ago
I started on an MBA a while back, and it bored the daylights out of me. There was very little logic or empiricism to the material, barring a few studies that one can find out about in common business publications. The material was mostly fluff. I can see why many MBA'ers have a PHB (Dilbert's boss) reputation, to be frank. It could be argued the real value is learning how to speak to and think like other MBA'ers (whether logical or not). And group projects are good for developing social skills for those who lack them. Hobnobbing has value in the real world. In short, it's more of a club than a discipline. But, it wasn't for me. Your mileage may vary; and I'll admit I bailed before taking some of the courses.
known 8y ago
You don't need MBA if you're rich and connected :)

260 points by tysone 8y ago

In engineering circles (coworkers), there is a general theme I notice of looking down on people with MBAs. I dismiss it as “us vs. them” or “technical vs managerial” fight. But, could someone who has a MBA shed some light with an objective view of MBA? Why shouldn’t I get one? Why should I get one?

canadapups 8y ago
I have an undergrad finance degree + finance career. I also run a website I built my self as a side project (see profile if curious). For a while after learning to code, I thought my business degree was useless. My coding skills felt so empowering compared to my finance/business skills. I can create with coding... learn and do. A car mechanics certificate felt more useful than a business degree. Over this period of introspection, I started paying attention to whenever my business/finance knowledge was actually useful. I very quickly realized that very smart people often have very little knowledge of finance and business. Business knowledge that I assumed as common sense (due to being surrounded by other finance people) is completely enlightening to others. With a business degree you learn how the world works, which is very important to anyone who wants to be entrepreneurial.
- sjg007 8y ago
  So how does the world work then?
- fermienrico 8y ago
  “Very smart people often have very little knowledge of finance and business.” This I found to be a glib generalization. What is so intrinsic about business knowledge that cannot be learned through studying and experience? Say compared to learning how compilers work and building one?
  - canadapups 8y ago
    I never said it can't be learnt. Business knowledge can be learnt through study and experience. For example, taking a MBA degree is one way. Many people who spent lots of time learning and building compilers haven't put the time to study or have the experience in business... which can make a MBA degree useful for them.
    - fermienrico 8y ago
      Then I think it has nothing to do with being “Smart”. I could say the same thing about business people - they have no idea how to write a compiler. I’m simply alluding to your statement that refers to “smart people” and their lack of business knowledge.
      - spyhi 8y ago
        I think you're misunderstanding what he's trying to say. He's not saying that knowing finance has anything to do with being smart--if anything, it's the opposite: Of the people he considers smart, he noticed knowledge of finance isn't widespread. Perhaps the average smart person doesn't find the problem interesting enough. For what it's worth, I was one of those people. I didn't go for my undergrad until 8 years into my adult life (I'm a veteran), but I had done extensive reading about business to the point that most of my BBA (which I was taking as a bonus alongside CS) felt like review. Except for finance. I knew the basics, but even undergrad courses revealed that my knowledge was very shallow. I think it's just something that people don't expect to have that much complexity. I wouldn't have thought to learn it if I hadn't been forced to take it in school, but I took as many finance courses as I could once I realized the knowledge deficit. Is finance hard? The sophisticated stuff can be, but generally in comparison to engineering it's not. But nonetheless, nearly none of the computer scientists in my class or in my professional circles have bothered to learn...probably because they're more interested in compilers ;)
        fermienrico 8y ago
        Quoting "I very quickly realized that very smart people often have very little knowledge of finance and business." Can you defend this statement? I don't think I am misunderstanding what he is trying to say. This statement makes no sense to me.
- sp527 8y ago
  The insinuation that the valuable aspects of a business education can't be picked up by a reasonably smart and motivated person is pure hoohah. For instance, I'm willing to bet the information in a combination of 'Lean Analytics' and 'High Output Management' would exceed the value of an entire MBA curriculum (which is anyway mostly focused on dealing with big company problems). The network is harder to replicate, but again not impossible. Someone who feels motivated to figure it out can do so.
  - jacques_chester 8y ago
    I don't think there's any insinuation. > For instance, I'm willing to bet the information in a combination of 'Lean Analytics' and 'High Output Management' would exceed the value of an entire MBA curriculum (which is anyway mostly focused on dealing with big company problems). That's a common cliché, but it's only partly true. There are problems that only occur at large scale (complex mergers, fancy legal structures, sophisticated financing). But the fundamental problems are all the same at every size. You need to manage cashflow, you need customers to become aware of the product or service and buy it, you need to be able to do things at a lower cost than your selling price, you need to keep proper records, pay wages, pay taxes, pay debts, manage inventory. These are universal problems of business. A whale has problems that a dolphin does not. But they both breathe, both pump blood, both eat and digest and move of their own volition. I feel there's often value in humbling yourself before another profession and seeing what you can learn.
    - sp527 8y ago
      > You need to manage cashflow, you need customers to become aware of the product or service and buy it, you need to be able to do things at a lower cost than your selling price, you need to keep proper records, pay wages, pay taxes, pay debts, manage inventory. Half these things take under a few days to learn sufficiently for any business with ARR under ~$1M. And you can anyway hire people to fill in the gaps in your own knowledge for basically peanuts. And there's no MBA program that will teach you strategies that are especially useful in reaching customers - if there was a professor who really could teach that, (s)he'd be monetizing that skillset instead. All this depends on your goals. I want to make that very clear. There is almost no value to an MBA for someone intending to build something from the ground up. There is potentially tremendous value for someone looking to have a career in business at larger companies.
ucaetano 8y ago
Computer Engineer by education here, I posted about it a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11209768 Pasting it here: I went for it mostly to switch industries and geographies, as well as for the "learning" part, which I just find fun. It worked really well for me, but I had clear expected outcomes. The marginal value of an MBA degree is diminishing as the knowledge is easily available anywhere, but there are a few things which still count: - Network: unlike an usual MSc or PhD, an MBA class has 100's of people, and you spend a lot of time with them, building a very solid network - Switching functions or industry: it gives you a very good starting point. If you're an engineer, it will be hard to switch straight into marketing, PM, finance, etc. Doing an MBA, plus a summer internship in your target function will make a huge difference. - Switching geographies: the job marketplace for new MBA grads is global (visa issues in some countries aside), and salaries are usually similar globally, so it's a nice opportunity to chose where you to live moving forward - You're being sponsored: just do it, seriously, don't even think about it On the learning side, even if you can find all the stuff online, it makes a huge difference to discuss implications face to face with some brilliant professors. Here's the top stuff I learned: * How to constantly assess your own decision biases and compensate for it * Lot's of game theory and strategy applied to real world * Negotiations * You're not gonna beat the market, so don't even bother * How power is created and traded inside organizations Why should you get one? Because a lot of that knowledge and skills you don't learn just by reading a book. It takes a lot of experience, experience sharing, cases, games and so on. Sadly, the enormous majority of engineers and product managers I meet are completely ignorant of basic product economics, business and finance basics, competitive strategy, etc. (Unsurprisingly, they don't consider themselves to be ignorant on those subjects, quite the opposite).
- denzil_correa 8y ago
  > Sadly, the enormous majority of engineers and product managers I meet are completely ignorant of basic product economics, business and finance basics, competitive strategy, etc. (Unsurprisingly, they don't consider themselves to be ignorant on those subjects, quite the opposite). One could the same the same about MBAs. A lot of them are quite ignorant about engineering and scientific basics. But, we don't ask managers to get engineering and PhD degrees. So may be, we need value different areas of expertise and learn to work together. I hope an MBA degree teaches some aspects of it.
bmpafa 8y ago
got my MBA, _then_ learned to code while trying to build a startup, so became 'technical' and 'managerial' at about the same time. I think my MBA taught me how to view the business at a systems level. When you consider the various financial and performance metrics that managers look at, a business is just another engineering problem. w/o the MBA, I'm not sure when I would've learned that way of thinking.
georgeecollins 8y ago
There is often a thing where engineers have issues with general managers, particularly non-technical ones. I don't think the degree has much to do with it. The best thing about an MBA is that you will learn about a variety of disciplines: finance and accounting, marketing, information technology, statistics, operations, economics, public relations, business strategy. You won't become expert in any of those fields but at a good school you will get to know classmates that are experts in each field. An MBA is a great opportunity to switch direction in your career. The bad thing about an MBA is it takes two years of your life and can be expensive. If you are an attractive candidate tuition is negotiable, so I think the time spent on it is the biggest problem. There is no bar exam for MBAs so be wary of second tier schools or "Executive" (night school) MBAs. They just mean less. No one cares about whether you have an MBA once you are five years into your career, but a very top school always looks good. Bottom line: the degree got too popular, got less valuable as the structure of business has changed since it was conceived, and it makes sense for fewer people to pursue it. Supply and demand, as the taught me :)
jerf 8y ago
I would point out that a lot of the techie disdain for "MBAs" isn't at MBAs in general (though there is some of that), but specifically at "Harvard MBAs", the high powered business types that are trained to swoop into a company, assess best how to tear it to bits, sell the pieces, and make a tidy profit for themselves and their paymasters while disrupting the lives of everybody else involved, and possibly the industry as a whole, or perform a variety of other such things that involve offloading all the risk and pain on to the employees while taking the profit and value for themselves. There is a time and a place for such shenanigans but the techies of folklore saw it happen in a lot of bad places in a lot of bad ways. Some of the rest of the disdain for MBAs is that a lot of such courses are aimed at the general public; if you are the type that had a computer science degree in your past, you will find the course to be slow and the coursework to be trivial, and you'll probably quite correctly feel you'd be better off on at least the most direct level (ignoring "networking", etc.) studying it yourself. But I kept my qualification to the speed of the course and the homework carefully; the ideas inside can still be useful and valuable, it's just they'll come at a rather slow pace compared to what you may be used to and wrapped in a lot of BS (to you) coursework.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  I think the bulk of the antipathy is directed toward the Excel/SAS jockeys who blindly use metrics to force an "improvement" in the business without understanding the business they are supposedly skilled at managing. Then there are those who want to make themselves look valuable by instituting change for change's sake.
- seppin 8y ago
  Engineers think they could do the business part of they "really wanted to", but don't believe MBAs could do their job. They think they are smarter. Also there's a shocking amount of nerds vs jocks BS that still goes on well into adulthood. Some people never get over high school.
  - Jach 8y ago
    To be fair, the startup mythos canon supports this. Many examples of programmers learning the business stuff on the fly as they scale, not out of a sense of "if I wanted to" but "now I need to". The opposite? If there are examples, they're not part of the mythos.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
MBA's typically go into one of three fields: consulting, finance and industry. You'll be exposed mainly to those in industry. An MBA is a generalized exposure to the business world, it gives you a basis in things like Finance, Economics, Accounting, Marketing, Economics, Ops etc. and then it delves into specific subjects as needed. If you don't have a background in any of this, it can be enlightening, to say the least. As an Engineer, learning core Financial/Econ concepts was basically like learning to speak English - it made me embarrassed at how 'illiterate' I was beforehand. Basically, reading the Financial Times goes from 'Chinese' to 'something you can understand'. I'd argue that it's very useful for people to have a broad understanding of these issues as they have increasing levels or responsibility in business. That said, you don't need it, and it can be in many ways limiting for an early entrepreneur because I feel it can get rather academic. It's in a way an 'intellectualization' of business, when in reality, business is about 'doing'. So consulting firms need people who have this breadth of knowledge, moreover, it helps considerably with their reputation. They have very established intakes, career progress etc.. Same can be said in the banking world: you come in, you do this for 2 years, you do your MBA, that gets you into this role, which you do for another 1.5, then you move onto this - etc. This amount of structure is vastly unlike startups. Again, it's arguably unnecessary, but it's baked into the career development cycle. Some very large organizations have those 'required steps' as well - because they have predictability in terms of ops, they sometimes put 'MBA' as a soft or hard requirement for certain things. It's an enlightening experience, and if you go to one of the better schools you meeting exceptional people including other students and profs. At the lesser schools - not so much. And the 'top schools' have guaranteed access to the best brands on earth. If you get an MBA from a top 15 globally, you can pretty much get an interview at a FANG. The benefit for those on an 'MBA specific career path' is measurable, which is about 1/2 of them, but for the other 1/2 it's more intangible. In terms of reputation, either you go to a 'top school' or the name recognition is not worth it, so you have to look at it differently. There are a lot of mediocre MBA's, just like there are a lot of mediocre software developers and UI designers. And an MBA is not a specific professional designation either - so I often feel there is undue slack. That said - there are too many of them out there, a lot of mid and low tier schools saw it as a cash cow and just sold expensive programs to whomever. Engineers (I am one) can be odd, and sometimes I think they are afraid and or devalue things they don't understand - particularly finance and marketing. Which is funny because the world of finance can be as nerdy as Engineering and it's very powerful stuff. I think most Engineers would love finance and Econ once they got going it it. Marketing is more intangible, but I've developed huge respect for those folks as well. The thing about startups is that they almost favour people with their nose to the grind, creating raw outcomes, even those who might be a little economically illiterate: witness the legions of founders who have no clue when it comes to shares, equity, financing instruments etc.. You have to very careful getting an MBA outside of finance or consulting. If you're company sponsors or has a requirement and it's obvious for your career path - then that's an option. If you did a really soft undergrad like 'English' and are having difficulty breaking into business and you know what you want to do - that's an option. But the worst thing that someone can do is just expect that they go there and it's a panacea and a magic entry point to business. It's one of the degrees that really is 'what you decide to make of it'. It's not like JD or Med School where there's in some ways a set system of outcomes.
jbob2000 8y ago
If you look at companies after the MBAs join and gain footing, what do they look like? What did Apple look like when Jobs left? What happened to Oracle when all the engineers left? What happened to Star Wars when it was bought by Disney? MBAs find the good value in a company and chop it up and charge you more. Anyone who is going to critisize this, I would just say; don’t miss the forest for the trees! You’re going to say all this stuff about how MBAs write board reports and do financials, blah blah blah. Yes, I know they do this. The end result of these things is what I described above.
airstrike 8y ago
I have a top 5 MBA degree that moved me from an $18k / year job in a third-world country to $360k in Manhattan 2 years after graduating. Presumably that's enough to motivate anyone.
- turnpikecruiser 8y ago
  Well, if that is true, you are the best evidence yet of the value of the degree. https://poetsandquants.com/2018/09/29/whos-hardest-hit-in-this-years-mba-app-slump/ https://poetsandquants.com/2018/09/29/whos-hardest-hit-in-th...

bennyfreshness 8y ago

Just an anecdote of my personal experience, since there's generally a sense of uselessness for MBAs in tech and I held the same view until recently getting an MBA. I was moving from engineering to product management and thought it would help my resume to get an MBA, but I was pleasantly surprised how useful in many other regards the process and learnings were. For sure learning on your own, doing things, building product, is better than structured curriculum. But there's something to be said for being exposed to a broad set of business information. When heads down writing code and building businesses, it's hard to step out and learn this disparate knowledge unless you're forced to by wanting to graduate. Maybe you're more disciplined than I, but in my free time I wouldn't dabble in accounting for instance, just wasn't interested. The forcing function is surprisingly helpful. I'm not claiming it's for everyone, but I got a ton out of my MBA and would recommend. My situation was moving from engineering to product, had full time PM job, trying to start a side business, which now has had significant growth that I attribute a lot to my learnings from the MBA.

autokad 8y ago
I am a Data Scientist w/ a MS in computer Science, but many of my CS classmates never become one despite desire to do so, while several of my MBA friends did so with ease (granted it is Wharton). I think an MBA is more useful over a master in CS because many MBA's have great stats programs. In most CS programs you'd have to use up precious elective spots to take those. Also, business intelligence is a huge part of many ds roles. And if you really wanted to take that Machine Learning course in CS, just take it as an elective in your MBA. I'd love to hear what others have to say on the topic
- wenc 8y ago
  I am a data scientist who spent my early career doing lots of BI work before moving on to my current role (years ago). I don't have an MBA, only a quantitative Ph.D. BI is more related to analytics than DS (broadly defined, DS deals with predictive, while BI deals with descriptive), and typically falls under the purview of data analysts. It also isn't really a prerequisite for DS work. Also, BI is a skill that is easily acquired in industry rather than in school. I don't know if an MBA is necessarily more useful than a MSCS if you want to become a data scientist. On the hiring end, quantitative training is strongly preferred for true DS positions over qualitative. Given a pool of people with quantitative degrees vs MBAs, it is very likely the former will have an advantage. The only exception is if the position isn't truly a DS one; many people advertise data analyst under a DS title to get a broader pool of candidates. It's common practice these days.

WisNorCan 8y ago

Clickbait headline and buried lede. This paragraph summarizes what the primary driver is: > World-wide, the number of M.B.A. applications was flat from 2017, partly because of an increase in students looking to pursue their degrees in Europe and Asia, according to the GMAC survey. Applications surged 8% to schools in Canada and 9% to schools in East and South Asia. Canada surging by 8% is not because schools in Canada are suddenly better than US counterparts. It is because of US policy and rhetoric under Trump. The relative loss of talent wanting to work here will hurt us. Consider that the CEOs of Google and Microsoft are all foreign born holders of MBAs. Edit: removed Elon Musk from MBA list. He studied business as part of his undergrad from Wharton.

vowelless 8y ago
> CEOs of Tesla I'm fairly certain this is false. He has an undergraduate degree from Wharton and has expressed multiple times how he prefers to avoid hiring MBAs.
flexie 8y ago
Musk doesnt have an MBA. But yes, Google and Microsoft hired MBAs as CEOs when they ceased to innovate at the same rate as before and started to be just ordinary companies defending a monopoly.
- harshalizee 8y ago
  Both Google and Microsoft CEOs have engineering degrees alongside their MBAs
- x220 8y ago
  Musk isn't a trend, he's a celebrity-cultural-icon data point.
dv_dt 8y ago
A portion of the whole value of an MBA is the networks, and why pay into a network with people within a nation that has an uncertain policy regarding foreign visitors and business people.

ghaff 8y ago

The reasons given in the article make a lot of sense to me. In a generally strong job market (among those likely to attend business school), taking 1 to 2 years off is a tougher sell, Also noted is that students already have more debt on average making taking on more tougher. There are new specialized degrees of various kinds. I also sense, though I don't have specific data, that a lot of jobs that traditionally required an MBA because reasons, no longer do so. It may still be valued but perhaps not to the point of being effectively required.

JDWolf 8y ago

Perhaps increased costs of living and undergrad are taking opportunity away from more people that would be interested.

Synroc 8y ago

While having considered it, for me, unless you are planning to move to Business org, it seems an MS in something technical is more valuable, even in engineering management, or Product Management, just looking at the degrees people at my company have in those positions. Is it the same at other places?

MrEfficiency 8y ago
I didnt get my Masters in a specifically technical field. Engineering Management was 60% Industrial Engineering and 40% business. I found 2 classes useful- >Lean Principles- changed my life, I started using Industrial Engineering at home and sharing my findings with the internet. It has been very popular. >Marketing class- 2 lessons, if you are going to put years into a project, do a marketing plan. Also, learned how incredibly important marketing is. Everything else was basically useless. Had a few crazies as professors in my business classes. Engineering classes were not bad, but not helpful. So 2/10 classes were useful? But incredibly useful.
- spyhi 8y ago
  > Marketing class- 2 lessons, if you are going to put years into a project, do a marketing plan. Also, learned how incredibly important marketing is. This was exactly why I chose to do a BBA alongside my CS degree. If I was gonna make something, I wanted to make sure it would have some impact on the real world. I tell people: CS is a tool for solving problems, but business is a tool for finding them.
sodafountan 8y ago
A growing number of people in the company I work at have no degree whatsoever

noMBAplease 8y ago

I went to a Wharton School MBA program introduction the other day. Or maybe it was Berkeley Haas, I can't remember. The lady leading the session to sell me a $150,000+ degree which requires me to leave my (extremely successful and promising career) for two years (and screw up my family life while doing it), started talking about how if people in the room got a bad grade in a certain area for their undergraduate degree - they might have to go back and fix it before they apply. Did I mention I have to pay the costs of this program 100% myself since most employers (and mine) won't cover it anymore? Once I heard that, I was done. Not only do I have to take three months to study for a stupid GMAT or GRE or whatever, I am also being held accountable for a grade I got over 12 years ago. In that 12 years, I quit my business career ,taught myself software engineering, built multiple applications used by millions of people every month before resuming my career as a manager of technical evangelist teams. The idea that I need to go get an MBA, take a GMAT, submit to covering for a bad grade 15 years ago after achieving a very high degree of proficiency in Objective-C and doing the things I have done since was so laughable it ended the desire for me to ever get an MBA. Maybe if they paid me I might consider it. I just dont get it. It is something I might do if I got rich in cryptocurrency and needed a hobby to pass the time, thats about it. Dont get me wrong, people (some) with MBAs I have met are often quite smart. But it seemed like an awful lot of time, stress and money and administrative nonsense for what the result is.

bluedevil2k 8y ago
Sounds like you weren't that serious about getting an MBA to begin with. Surely you knew most of what she told you before going into the introduction.
0x8BADF00D 8y ago
I’d argue that you don’t need one, since you’ve already accomplished so much and have a proven track record. An MBA is mainly for people who want to switch careers entirely. Maybe an EMBA would be more appropriate for the stage you are in your career.
brianwawok 8y ago
Most working people do executive MBAs. No reason to quit. Did this degree force fulltime?

vinayms 8y ago

Are there any well regarded studies that show that hiring an MBA graduate as a manager benefits the company compared to having an "old school" manager who's only qualification is being clever and shrewd? Or studies that show the opposite?

jotjotzzz 8y ago

Perhaps, in this economy and the rising student debt crises, it's hard to suspend work to go get an education to get a loan and graduate to find a job that may or may not pay enough. I know others are doing part-time MBA's but I cannot see anyone getting into debt to get an MBA if you are in the middle class. I think this is probably due to deteriorating middle class more so than the degree losing luster.

lordnacho 8y ago

So I did a fair bit of an MBA as part of a joint course with Engineering at a well known UK institution. It wasn't literally an MBA, but the MBA there was just one year whereas there was an equivalent amount of time spent at the business school if you chose the right electives. A couple of my classmates went on and got full 2-year MBAs from very prestigious US institutions. The verdict, both from those who went on to do something technical, and those who went on to other things, is that Engineering is harder. It may not pay as well, and it's harder, but it's probably more fun if you find the right job. My friend who is a PE partner wondered what he missed out on, since a girl he knew from Engineering went and joined SpaceX very early on. There were a few stories about people who got into F1 as well. The other part is that you don't actually learn a great deal about business in business school. You won't learn how to make decisions in a strategy class. You won't learn how to invest in a finance class. You might learn some things about the history of thought in the field, eg Taylorism. But generally it is not what it says on the tin. By contrast I built a working radio in my first term as well as a bridge that an adult could stand on. A really big issue, which to their credit they pointed out at business school, is that it might be better for managers to have domain knowledge in what they manage, rather than just be general management "specialists". I happen to fall into this more Teutonic camp. Also, note that very few people that I know report taking an MBA to learn anything. They generally are as cynical as they ought to be about it (!) and did it in order to have better job prospects. It's worked out very nicely for them.

duxup 8y ago

I can't read the article, but I wonder if it is just diluted perception of an MBA. I worked at a company that regularly hired recent MBA graduates, and maybe it was just the school, but I saw little value added to these kids. They got manager type tasks, but showed no skills related to management. Their life experience was so limited that I had to explain it to them that you have to schedule people far ahead of time in order to give them time to schedule their lives, and that you had to schedule them like humans because ... they can't work for 24 straight hours because it would take 5 minutes more to look at the spreadsheet and figure out a more optimal schedule. Beyond internal stuff, even communicating with customer's took hand holding and teaching basic life lessons. I often questioned how the candidates I worked with ever got into an MBA program (I'm guessing it was just open). I wouldn't trust some of them to work at a menial job without a great deal of supervision, let alone make decisions for a business / other people. IMO an MBA just doesn't make sense without significant / proven business life experience for most people. It really was the FedEx commercial IRL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcoDV0dhWPA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcoDV0dhWPA Obviously there are people with MBAs with FAR more skills, but with other folks like I experienced I wonder if it has watered down the market for MBAs.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
diminoten 8y ago
> Their life experience was so limited At what point in their careers did they go get an MBA? My fiancée went to Kellogg and it was a rarity to see anyone there who didn't already have 5+ years of work experience. It was sort of an unspoken (but kind of spoken, since the M7 all highly suggest it) rule.
- da02 8y ago
  What was her # of years of experience and industry before getting the MBA? (developer? engineer?)
  - diminoten 8y ago

booleandilemma 8y ago

So what are the type of people who went for MBAs now going for?

diminoten 8y ago
According to the article, still MBAs but in Canada and Asia.

draw_down 8y ago

It will go back up once all those newly-minted coders realize there's a ceiling on their careers :) (Please note I'm not saying this is a good thing)

sjg007 8y ago

Real estate 101: location, location, location. MBA 101: network, network, network.

ccozan 8y ago
Finally someone who gets it. Is about the network. I tried to pursue an EMBA, they advertised everywhere that the alumni are in every big company and because of the closed group communication, was really really easy to reach any CXO because of the school. Otherwise, yes, I declined because of the huge time invest - money wasn't an issue, like being for a month in HK or in Buenos Aires with my class. Interesting, but not really helping.

refurb 8y ago

This isn’t all that surprising. MBA applications went up during the last recession. If you’re working and getting good opportunities and comp, why not keep going? It’s not like you can’t go get an MBA later.

bitxbit 8y ago

MBA is simply not worth it outside of maybe top four or five programs here in the US. I rather see people focus on mastery learning within or outside of traditional graduate settings.

chad_strategic 8y ago

TLDR: I needed an MBA to transition out of career path & then 2008 happened. My interesting journey after getting an MBA: -Received my MBA 2007, just a year before the full blown financial crisis. I needed an MBA to transition out adverting/marketing. -2009-2011 Couldn't find a job. My MBA was in Finance. Taught myself to program financial algorithms. (php/MySql) -2012 Became a coder, programmer, software developer. Made good money programming other people's dumb ideas. No risk, no suits and ties and very few meetings. -2018 Not going to become the CTO at Google or Facebook. Being a Code Monkey is "meh", but I have to work on my own projects at night to be intellectually challenged. Now looking for a job where I can implement programming knowledge while at the same time work more with the business side. There always seems to be a certain lack of communication between the software side and the business side. See my profile if you want to discuss.

Rafuino 8y ago

If you read the article, a lot of the decline is from international applicants. Reading other articles, the drop is primarily about visa concerns for post-MBA employment in the US, and who can blame them? My international classmates had a hell of a time getting work authorization even before our current political situation. This is WSJ clickbait, more or less, and you see why they do this because this topic always rouses the attention of the HN crowd :)

rb808 8y ago

As an aside I wonder if this Kavanaugh thing helps to mean all elite schools lose their luster. I'm not that happy about sending my children to a school filled with entitled preppy douche-bags.

debacle 8y ago
What about how Kavanaugh presents himself makes you believe he's an entitled preppy douchebag?
gravis7777 8y ago
Typical nonsense liberal response anytime someone starts with money in their life and then continues to work hard to attain their status. Somehow it must have just been handed to them by some secret rich whiteboy freemason organization. No judge at his level, liberal or conservative, hasn't paid their dues.

Dowwie 8y ago

I wrote this as a comment in another post a few days ago but I'll cross-post it here as it is relevant. One of my defining decisions was taking leave and eventually dropping out of a top executive mba program a third of the way in, before I had to take a six figure loan to pay the rest. If I am to be brutally honest with myself, the decision not to finish wasn't entirely my own, but I could have finished. The shit really hit the fan in my life and this forced me to take stock. Had I not been forced, I probably would have continued down the mba path and career change. Losing my father after two very sick years, being laid off by a business in collapse, having a six figure student loan application on my desk, and other crucial "etc" pushed me to reevaluate my life decisions. Here are some important lessons learned: An MBA from a reputable program was leading me into debt servitude and constraints that would shape my career. Debt constraints are major life constraints. Changing careers to do something that was more meaningful can lead to many new opportunities. I left prime brokerage in financial services and was planning to transition into healthcare, hospital cfo type of work. Helping create novel solutions to rising costs of healthcare was a mission I could align myself with. Helping protect investment bank lending to hedge funds through margin financing paid well but served no higher purpose. Healthcare doesn't have a monopoly on purpose, though, and many who work in healthcare do so just to collect a paycheck. I realized I could achieve my goal elsewhere and with fewer bureaucratic constraints, but at a cost-- as an entrepreneur! Entrepreneurship has been everything I expected it to be. I had to become the technical expert I needed as a partner. It's been a long, grueling experience. I am so fortunate to have taken it.

jackgolding 8y ago
This resonates with what I consider when making big life choices - choose flexibility over long term commitments (at least outside family.)

AtlasBarfed 8y ago

IIRC accounting is still one of the basics of MBAs. Because what company runs without accounting? Here's a question, what business runs without information systems? Do modern MBAs require understanding of computing basics as they do accounting?

jkw 8y ago

I wish this article would touch upon economic trends' impact on MBA applications. MBA applications go down as the economy performs. The opportunity cost is higher when there are well paying jobs readily available and promotions to be had without needing to go back school. During a recession, MBA applications should go up as work is not as readily available. People also want to retrain their skills to make themselves more marketable to employers, as anyone else would do by going to vocational schools during hard times.

resters 8y ago

I strongly advocate a policy of "No MBAs" in a startup. The last thing a startup needs is someone who has little to no business experience, has a big attitude, has spent the last few years on professional networking and partying, and who expects due to the MBA to be able to boss others around. There are exceptions of course, but in my experience the MBAs want to network to bring in others from their school/program to form a management cabal. It's really bad news. We should also remember that if startups weren't a high status thing to work on these days, all those MBAs would be working for big companies and would have no interest in startups.

wutangson1 8y ago
Hmm, sounds like you have some war stories (sorry for the knee jerk pun) from hbs.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

The content of an MBA program is probably useful. The problem is that it became associated with an easy path to a high-earning credential, so it self-selected for people who expect to earn a high wage, who want graduate education to be as easy as possible, and who want credential and status to be the main ways of getting money (instead of, say, working hard to have a skill). The light got shined on this type of program, these credential-seeking roaches scattered, and now they’ll go ruin some other perfectly reasonable academic discipline, most probably data science. I don’t blame the roaches. I guess I blame idiots who buy knowledge products based on credential, and thus either employ these credential roaches at high wages, or else generate the demand that makes it profitable for other consulting / white-shoe sorts of businesses to employ the roaches.

x220 8y ago
You are basically criticizing people for wanting money and not wanting to do unnecessary work for it. You might as well criticize human nature. 99% of people pick the best path they can see towards an easier life that gives them the most suitable work/money trade-off they are able to tolerate. If MBA grads aren't good at what they do, that's the fault of MBA programs. MBA grads just want to get credentials and training and make money, just like almost every person in the world. I tend to shy away from personal statements, but your use of "roaches" makes me think that some of what you say bleeds from personal wounds.
- mlthoughts2018 8y ago
  Criticizing human nature is a good way to improve our behavioral defaults. For example using science instead of burning witches. You seem surprised someone would criticize a bad manifestation of human nature. That puzzles me, given that it’s so historically effective.
  - x220 8y ago
    I'm surprised you're criticizing MBA grads instead of the MBA programs, since the MBA programs aren't teaching effectively while the MBA grads are merely trying to get a better life.

Vaslo 8y ago

I got an MBA from a top 10ish business school and it was probably the best career choice I have ever made. Very technical MBAs (think Carnegie Mellon, MIT, etc) teach way more than business these days and it makes the value skyrocket.

aliston 8y ago
How so? Have you remained technical after graduating?

TuringNYC 8y ago

We're 10 years into a bull market. Suppose you apply now, that means you start September 2019 and graduate May 2021. No one knows how the economy will be, but i'd be pretty worried about graduating deep in the trough of a recession.

otoburb 8y ago
This reasoning is sound. If one felt an MBA was worth it, probably better to try for a part-time MBA while keeping their current job. The only disadvantage is that many have said the networking and career opportunities are slightly better for full-time MBAs if students wish to shift their careers completely into different sectors. I would say that knowing exactly what one wants from an MBA program, financial situation and risk tolerance, will usually tip the scales in favour of a part-time MBA.

ThomPete 8y ago

Applications to expensive universities, in general, will probably decline over time as the primary reason for attending these schools were the value of the network more than the actual education (it was still great but it's been more and more commoditized) and it seems like a strong network can be created in so many other ways now. Still there are going to be people who will send their kids to expensive schools but the value is going to diminish over time I think.

martin1975 8y ago

Somewhat tangential to the topic, https://personalmba.com/ https://personalmba.com/ teaches you more or less all the book knowledge of a fairly decent MBA program, for an infinitesimal price relative to what you'll pay at an Ivy league or even a state school. What you don't get w/the Personal MBA is the support of your professors, other students, and most importantly the network and recognition ... MBA is really something one should do if they're passionate about people, relationships - e.g. what any solid business is made of.... more so than about just the knowledge or what school they go to.

jacques_chester 8y ago
I can't say I agree with your assessment of that book. It read as though the author was utterly enraptured by The Lean Startup (itself a frustrating exercise in padding out a handful of insightful blog posts) and was determined to hang every. single. thing. on that one lamp post.

analog31 8y ago

One thing I've observed is that the MBA degree is valued by people with MBA degrees. This leads to "clusters" of MBA's in the corporate hierarchy. If the path above you contains MBA's, then you might need one yourself in order to advance. On the other hand, if they believe that you have prospects, they might offer to pay for it.

tardo99 8y ago

The same exact thing happened in 1999 and 2000. It's because of the bubble. When it pops, these schools will be extra-competitive for a few years while going through the heaps of applications from failed startups.

neonate 8y ago

http://archive.is/aiqFB http://archive.is/aiqFB

JacobJans 8y ago
Is it obvious to anyone else that this is blatant copyright infringement? Does anyone care?
- cocacola1 8y ago
  Not as it pertains to WSJ. I tried to delete an account I had with them multiple times; utter failures.
- abenedic 8y ago
  Of course it is obvious, it is just that almost no one online believes that the information contained within is worth enough to subscribe, and there is not a frictionless way to compensate the other the $0.03 cents worth of value I potentially got from the article.
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    Then don't read it. If it's valuable enough to pirate, it's valuable enough to pay for.
    - manicdee 8y ago
      On the flip side, if it’s valuable enough to pirate, the shipping company should have had better security.
      - analognoise 8y ago
        I asked that question once, apparently crews aren't armed and it's a big deal to start shooting at people at sea. There are videos of people fending off pirates (actual, sea based pirates) with water hoses. I don't get that - it seems pretty obvious you could arm a crew and fend off some assholes with AK47s (you have the high ground, lots of corridors, time to prepare and can afford some .50's on the deck) - but then again, I'm so American I am practically a Bald Eagle.

shay_ker 8y ago

A lot of the course material from MIT Sloan is online, for free: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/

amb23 8y ago

MBA programs should adjust to the market by developing more concentrated 1-year degrees in specific disciplines: Finance, Operations, Marketing, Product, etc. The first year of most MBAs are just core courses in various business disciplines: you'll learn accounting if you know you want to be a brand manager for a CPG company, or you'll learn org design if you're aiming for a job at a hedge fund. While I see the value in interdisciplinary education--and while I strongly endorse interdisciplinary core courses for undergrad--these courses simply aren't necessary for a professional degree and the extra year of school costs are prohibitively expensive. I'd love to see more concentrated MBAs that really focus on specific disciplines. Basically, cut out the first year of an MBA and just focus on a core set of discipline-specific courses. Most MBA program already have these designed as "concentrations" so I'd imagine the actual implementation of such a program wouldn't be too complex. And if they're only one year long, the price would be halved. I've personally considered, and considered against, an MBA degree due to the prohibitive costs to even apply, but a program like this would make it much easier to swallow that pill.

otoburb 8y ago
INSEAD is a highly respected MBA program (outside of the US) that offers a 10 month MBA[1]. This sounds more like what you are referring to, geared towards those with around 6 years of work experience. [1] https://www.insead.edu/master-programmes/mba https://www.insead.edu/master-programmes/mba

epa 8y ago

As prices rise, does demand decrease? :-)

srbl 8y ago

Haven't seen any business school professors chime in yet, so as one I'll do so: Increasingly, what "elite" undergraduate schools offer at the graduate level is less valuable than what research universities offer. The best professors are sequestered in individual labs or in large research universities, not in schools valued for ratings that are focused on undergraduates. The best educations are provided by people who understand learning and make themselves available to assist in the process - nothing about Harvard, Wharton, Tuck, etc. is better suited than University of California, University of Texas, NYU, many other state universities to perform those tasks. Furthermore, and it might deserve an entirely separate post, but many of the best professors in business are being bought up by Asian business schools. I think the net result is the American business school experience is both more valuable in terms of the topics covered and less valuable in terms of the educational experience than it once was.

Itaxpica 8y ago
A quick side note - NYU is private (and generally seen as elite at the undergrad level, with the price tag to match), not a state university. The state schools in New York are the SUNY (State University of New York) system outside of the city, and the CUNY (City University of New York) system inside the city.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
"The best professors are sequestered in individual labs or in large research universities" I don't think this applies to most MBA subjects, as least as much as it does the others. It's a highly applied and contemporary discipline, perhaps one of the least theoretical. My best Finance prof, for example, who taught us Private Equity / VC, had personal relationships with so many of the best funds. He spends a lot of time in the field, staying in tune with trends in the industry. He was able to bring in really bright minds from the field, and it always made for the most engaging material. Even advanced corporate finance with all the cases like Volkswagen and their amazing currency trading activities ... it's all very much the real world material.

amrx431 8y ago

Quite opposite to what is happening in India. India's premier business schools like IIMs are seeing a steep increase in candidature.

tabtab 8y ago

I started on an MBA a while back, and it bored the daylights out of me. There was very little logic or empiricism to the material, barring a few studies that one can find out about in common business publications. The material was mostly fluff. I can see why many MBA'ers have a PHB (Dilbert's boss) reputation, to be frank. It could be argued the real value is learning how to speak to and think like other MBA'ers (whether logical or not). And group projects are good for developing social skills for those who lack them. Hobnobbing has value in the real world. In short, it's more of a club than a discipline. But, it wasn't for me. Your mileage may vary; and I'll admit I bailed before taking some of the courses.

known 8y ago

You don't need MBA if you're rich and connected :)