To add a bit more here: You should really try to get as much additional information as you can about someone instead of judging them on a heuristic alone. Just

To add a bit more here: You should really try to get as much additional information as you can about someone instead of judging them on a heuristic alone. Just a 20 minute conversation can be incredibly revealing if you're good at talking to people (which admittedly, is not a common enough skill). While MBA programs produce no shortage of head-scratchers, I also know several MBA grads who are sharp as a tack, who are no-nonsense hard workers, and that any ambitious company would be lucky to hire. The problem is that all of them ended up at the big management consultancies. And this is by design -- the consultancies realized that they can go chumming for suckers at the top business schools to get respectable looking worker bees, and business schools used this fact (the "prestige" and the high initial salaries) to market their programs and to justify tuition increases. This vicious cycle has completely eaten the elite business schools and now they're basically just feeders for management consultancies and banks. The success metric of every elite business school is the number of graduates they manage to shovel into these jobs. But you don't need an MBA when all you're doing is parroting back whatever your employer's client wants you to tell them -- you mostly just need to look the part and have enough social graces to make the client feel like they're interacting with "one of their own" (read: someone from their class / social circle). So it's not too much of a leap to see that letting in a trust-fund kid with zero skills or experience is totally fine by bank and management consultancy standards -- they grew up around other rich people! They're perfect! Even though they're not so great for people like you and me, who might prefer someone who can think and act strategically over someone with upper-class social graces. And the management consultancies really are a sucker's game. It's not actually "up or out" as is commonly suggested... It's more like "you make partner, and pay yourself disproportionately more for all the work that everyone below you produces, or you realize that the 'rainmakers' are taking advantage of you and you quit." But the realization can sometimes take a decade or longer as you suppress your gut feelings and get used to a pseudo-lavish lifestyle that the next-best-option-that-actually-allows-you-to-use-your-brain might not be able to cover. It's the same story with big-name law firms. The salary distribution for law school graduates is bimodal -- $60-70k for grads of lower-tier schools or for grads who don't make the cut with the big firms or who go into public service, and $155,000 +/- ~$500 at all of the prestigious law firms (or whatever it was last year + 2.5%). But you'll be putting in all the hours and doing all of the real work for the next 10-20 years while some partner wines and dines and takes home $20 million a year off of your labor. This is why I generally don't advise people to go to business school. While I know plenty of people who would probably gain a lot from a rigorous business school curriculum, everything about the program -- their classmates, the faculty, the internship, even the calculus when evaluating their offers -- will push them into making a decision that I think many of them will regret 10 or 20 years later. Most of the people who have asked me about this are quite smart. When I ask about their motivation, the common factor is that they want more leverage on their brain power. They want to continue to be the intelligent person that they are, but they want to magnify their output, or be taken more seriously. Contrary to some tropes, I haven't found many that just want to make more money at any cost. They certainly don't want to be "takers" (from "makers vs. takers"). But the management consultancies and the partners that run them -- remember, this is the pinnacle of success for these schools! -- are the massive fat cats of the "taker" world. Not only do they take actual money that should really be going to the smart people doing the work, they also take these people away from more productive and more satisfying opportunities elsewhere in society. It's been interesting watching the career progression of friends and acquaintances from my parents' generation who worked at these sort of "make partner or die trying" pressure cookers. Four or five made the equivalent of partner at their firm, made obscene amounts of money, neglected their children (who are now in law school after years of rebellious misbehaving), are now empty nesters with a 15,000 square foot nest, and are largely miserable. Basically everybody else who left (after sticking it out for 5-20 years) wishes that they had left sooner. Sure, they made good money, but in their environment it was never enough, and they never got to use their skills in a way that had any sort of outcome, let alone an outsized one. It was all just extreme busywork. I'm hopeful that at least some of the drops in business school applications are from people seeing this shell game for what it really is. The business school curriculum is interesting and can be quite valuable. But the big management consultancies can go die in a fire.