I spoke once with the MBA program manager (or something, I don't know what, he wasn't the dean for sure) at my university. He summarized that an MBA is a profe

I spoke once with the MBA program manager (or something, I don't know what, he wasn't the dean for sure) at my university. He summarized that an MBA is a professional degree, not an academic degree. As such, the value from an MBA depends on who your classmates are, not what your profs/textbooks say. He said that it's often the prof actually learning from the students. They can discuss case studies and business issues in class, and each student can add something special to the discussion. "Well, we experienced this exact thing back in our 2004 expansion push, and these were the issues that we encountered and how we dealt with them." "That's funny, we experienced something similar in 2005, but it was in Japan, and dang, we had a totally different set of experiences, this is what we had to do, but we failed at this and that in the attempt. These were our results from the whole thing." Joe Schmoe with no real experience can try to mumble something that he learned back during his Marketing 303 class, but nobody will care. If the university is worth anything, Joe Schmoe would not be accepted in the first place. So the guy emphasized to me that the real value from an MBA is not the fancy 3 letters, nor the fancy job prospects, though those are all nice bonuses. He emphasized that the real value was the professional network that would be accumulated (the better the school, the better the network as a general rule), and correspondingly, the wealth of information and future opportunities that could be gathered from that professional network. So it sounds very similar to a comment someone made about why they found university to be valuable in that other thread about whether to attend university. On the flip side, I knew a director of marketing from when I worked in telco. He had an MBA from Phoenix University online. His class included a hotel clerk, for reference in terms of their student quality. But he wasn't expecting anything out of it. He came from an engineering background and had gradually transitioned into sales and marketing. But he found as he moved up the chain in sales and marketing, he lacked some of the fundamental aspects of business that many of his peers seemed to possess (simple things, like even vocabulary; what the heck does managerial accounting mean, and how does it differ from regular accounting?). So he enrolled into Phoenix just so that he could talk shop properly with his peers. He's a lifer at that telco, a rising star, so getting an MBA from Harvard wouldn't help him achieve his goals any better than Phoenix would. His goals were just to keep growing inside the company, not seek a high-profile exec position somewhere else; Phoenix provided him the tools he needed to do exactly what he wanted. So in the end, it depends on what you're looking for.