It is silly to say "Has anyone checked the 20 year return on a master's of fine arts degree lately". The 20 return on a swimming class at the Y may not be that

It is silly to say "Has anyone checked the 20 year return on a master's of fine arts degree lately". The 20 return on a swimming class at the Y may not be that great either, but at least you learn how to swim. But MBA programs advertise themselves as producing higher earners. I'd like to propose a few hypotheses -- I think the truth is a mixture of these: * There is no special skill at managing business, any more than there is a special skill at reading goat guts or tarot cards. Trends in outsourcing, in large companies shedding their disparate divisions into separate companies, are a tacit admission that the person who knows how to manage one way of making money has no special capability in another. This often goes under the motto "focus on core competency", and the very MBAs who once claimed a competency in managing business now admit that the best strategy is to pick the money maker that is somehow already working and just ride it. * In contradiction to the above, there is such a skill as general business management; however, like debugging, certain kinds of highly end programming, medical diagnosis and bedside manner, it can be learned but not taught. The only hope for acquiring it is to do it as much as possible, there is some subtlety of the skill that is simply not communicable from one human to another. * MBA programs are actually a kind of negative education, in that they make the participants stupider. That this is possible in humans is demonstrated by examples of cults and other fanatical movements. Like a cult compound, the MBA program provides constant uncritical validation of particular points of view, and isolation from the rest of the world, particularly the cold, hard realities of real work. Much of the criticism of MBA programs applies to other higher education as well, of course.