Putting together my own + my classmates + my college friends at top 5 programs, my takeaway is that the 3 main reasons to enroll in one are (1) to switch industries (or roles within an industry), (2) to take time off without leaving a hole in your resume (matters a lot in nontechnical fields), and (3) gain a particular network that you lack (ex: Wharton for finance, Stanford for SV, etc.). These reasons may sound trivial but for the right kind of person, the program can be a decent~good trade for their time and money opportunity cost.
The "move up the corporate chain" thing used to be more true (ex: you need to have a MBA to move up past a certain rung in the org chart) but is increasingly less so today. These days, if you're good, you're good. A noteworthy might be the "in-between" phase after the 2 year consulting or finance analyst program, but a large fraction of this cohort fits into (1) above.
The "learning" is nonzero but seems underwhelming and not anywhere near worth the funds you need to put up. Frankly if you know what you want to be doing in the future, imo you'll learn more by actually spending those 2 years actually working and doing those things (which was my main reason for dropping out). It may make more sense if you're a pretty bright person who doesn't really know what you want to do in the future but you do know that it isn't what you're doing now (ex: my journalist friends who saw the industry as a dead end).
edit: Also it's unwise to bucket all programs as "MBAs" since each one can be surprisingly different in what they offer in terms of concrete benefits.
edit2: For young professionals without a strong signaling institution thus far in their academic and professional careers, an MBA may be one of the more feasible options to get a mulligan in this regard. Say what you will about paying up for a signal, but it can pay off depending on the role and industry you're going for.
Plus the average age of MBA grads seems to be getting lower. (True?) At this point, I'm 30, two levels above where my company brings on MBAs, and have MBA direct reports. So leaving to get a MBA seems like a step back.
You brought up a great point about the average age. If you're entering a school where the average age is low, I would say that it's not as useful unless you know that your classmates are young high-fliers who actually have solid experience.
For someone looking to marginally improve their standing, it doesn't help. A 30 year old director who wants to be in the same company isn't improved. Or should go to an exec program on the company dollar.
But there is no better way to get into strategy consulting or investment banking if you're not there already. And if you have a soft undergrad that isn't taken seriously, the right top 6-8 MBA will.
To your point - there are many cheaper, faster and more effective ways to accomplish most of the goals if you're already successful. (Except for learning Accounting - it's impossible to learn unless a school is forcing you and giving you exams. It's just too boring otherwise.)
What ways are you referring to?
Also, regarding networking: 50-70% of your class-mates will not be career switchers: They'll already have banking or consulting backgrounds, already speak the language and know each other's firms. Make friends with them or you're not going to reap the much-touted "networking" benefits of MBA school.
I went to a top-10 school, but happened to graduate the year Lehman and Bear imploded, and ended up right back in engineering. So, for me it ended up not being worth it financially--but for folks who graduated a few years before me it was totally worth it. Do the math and make sure you can deal with that risk.
edit: Worth mentioning is that the career offices of these programs definitely overstate the effectiveness of the "come to our program and get your dream job" aspect. In that sense it's similar to the misleading rhetoric of Law Schools.
Can anyone elaborate on how this is more important in nontechnical than technical fields? I've always thought this was a red flag no matter what your field may be, unless you have a good story to tell about why you took the break.
I agree with most of your points, but in this case I think you should consider how your personal circumstances influence your opinion. You spent one quarter in an MBA program. That's neither enough time, nor enough depth, from which to draw categorical conclusions about the quality of all MBA classes. More likely than not, you encountered some intro/core classes. Maybe an elective or two? But really, you were just scratching the surface.
I'm not going to sit here with a straight face and claim that the MBA core curriculum offers the average intellectual depth and rigor of a graduate program in any of the hard sciences. Clearly it doesn't. But I do think there's depth to be found in an MBA program, provided you seek it out.
That's kind of the issue with MBA programs, too: they are catch-all programs designed to service any number of diverse career outcomes. You can enter an MBA program seeking to become an investment banker, load up on the necessary courses called for by the field, and graduate having received a wildly different education than a classmate who went in to become a CPG brand marketer. Or a classmate who went in to run a web publishing business. Or a classmate who went in to take the reins of a Coca Cola bottling plant. Or a classmate who went in to learn the business side of industrial design. Or a classmate who went in as part of a JD/MBA program and wanted depth in IP case law. Etc.
It's sort of like college that way. You get out of it what you put into it. MBA programs are notorious for graduating a number of people who took the path of least resistance: a bare-bones survey of a variety of topics, just enough to check the boxes for graduation. Nevertheless, you can wring plenty of depth and intellectual interest from the various subjects an MBA program has to offer. You just have to have the will to challenge yourself -- and for various reasons (many of them economically rational!), a lot of students choose not to.
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
Some people have an aptitude for diplomacy and it comes naturally. Others don't. Some are completely turned off by the entire concept that quality work can't stand on its own. Intuiting and playing the power dynamics in an organization is a critical skill for managers especially (and in particular if they want to set their teams up for success). You can read all the theory and case studies you want but if it doesn't come naturally and/or you don't have opportunities to practice, it's going to be tough to make inroads. You can almost imagine it like the current US presidential nomination process. All the candidates are shit, on both sides, but astute folks know it only matters a little bit because there are plenty of smart people behind the scenes who actually pull the strings and make the important decisions. Those are the career diplomats, who are supported by specialist analysts, who are in turn receiving data and insights from technical staff.
One of the easiest ways to "improve" in this area is to start by trying to figure out what the corporate BD strategy is (as well as the entire industry sector), then try to learn what individuals' agendas are, and finally connect the dots and figure out what critical role you or your team can play in the context of the bigger pictures. That's business. Business is not the same as making things. Business is the practice of instilling confidence and trust in other people, ultimately convincing them to give you money for something they find valuable.
A good way to learn is to pay close attention to the way managers talk about it. Movies like Office Space and The Office cut close at the truth, but don't quite get you there. They're dramatizations, moving at the speed of narrative, whereas real situations move at the speed of conversation.
One of the key things to remember is that qualifications have very, very little to do with it. The main thing they're looking for is for other people to like you. "Like you" is manager-speak for the sort of respect that will get them to take you seriously as a manager. If you ask them to do something, will they do it? Even if it has nothing to do with their job duties? That's a quality of a good manager.
Second, they need to need your services and they need to get it at the right price. They once tapped me to hire a junior engineer under me. I could not find anyone willing to work for the prices they wanted to pay, so I couldn't move up. Eventually they decided to switch technology stacks rather than acquire human capital.
During these talks, it was all I could do to keep up with the hidden meanings behind the things they were saying. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it with the benefit of hindsight, there are aspects of that experience that clearly show why there's so much coded language around this process and how I screwed things up by not understanding the language and expectations beforehand. I regret nothing, as I've got way better options than middle management at a non-technical firm.
We didn't have a specific book, and it was a very unique class, my favorite after competitive strategy (essentially applied game theory).
Some of the readings were on Robert Moses, LB Johnson, the movie 12 Angry Men (Henry Fonda version), etc.
Essentially you can take any good biography of a powerful person and try to proactively identify the sources of power they had, how they harnessed and yielded it, and what impact it had.
It requires some suspension of disbelief, since power is usually seen as negative, so you need to be a bit cynical while doing it (just don't be cynical in real life, nobody likes an asshole).
You can do the same in you job (that was actually the final paper): who holds power (and which type of power) over you? Why? Where do they source their power from? Skill? Reputation? Formal authority?
What power do you have? Over whom? Why? Where do you get it from?
This was one of those classes where it would be hard to replicate the same learning by yourself. The other one was negotiations.
Net - I think MBAs from non-top schools are worthless for most of the reasons the author suggested.
But... There is value in specific fields for top degrees. More than half the people from top 6-8 programs who want to get into banking or elite consulting programs can get there. If you really want to work for Bain/BCG/McK and you recruit on campus from a top program, you have an ~50% shot depending on the market. If you don't have that top MBA, it's much lower. (Less than 2%?) Similar with front office jobs in investment banking.
What about technology, which is what most people here care about? I see a disproportionate amount of non-engineering CEOs with Computer Science undergrads followed by MBAs from a small subset of schools. (Harvard and Stanford followed by a big drop, then Kellogg, Penn, Chicago Booth and Cal in the next tier - perhaps I'm missing one or two) The #s are very disproportionate to what these schools produce.
Is it causation or correlation? Much harder to say. These are hyper-talented people. They have technical skills too. I suspect they get some benefit from the sorting mechanism in place, the network, and the confidence that they built. Good CS programs are much more academically rigorous than most MBA programs, so I don't think it's genius granted from the mountaintop.
I've strongly advised people to avoid programs outside the top 20 for economic reasons. If someone else is paying for it, and you're interested in learning about business for it's own sake, sure. But the maximum NPVs accumulate only to the grads from the top few schools. In this sense, MBAs are much more similar to law degrees than technical degrees.
If the network from your MBA program abroad isn't that strong in the industry that you work in or in your geography, you'll get minimal value out of it. If the network from your MBA program is not in senior (or more senior positions than you are), you'll get minimal value. This is why there is a pareto distribution between the top programs and the other tiers of programs.
There are plenty of foreign MBA programs that have robust networks in the US. Take a look at the Global MBA list. http://rankings.ft.com/exportranking/global-mba-ranking-2015...
Within the top 15 globally: Insead (worldwide), Iese (Spain), Ceibs (China), HKUST (China), HEC (France).
Although not in the top 15, IIT has a robust network in the tech industry.
1) A self funded MBA from a 3rd tier school is rarely a positive NPV transaction, especially when you view the opportunity cost. (A lot of hours that could be spent doing something else productive)
2) There is an enormous gap between the outcomes of top schools and everyone else.
3) There are very good schools outside the US and UK (Insead in France and Singapore, Rotterdam in the NL) but in general the further you go from the US, the less value from the MBA.
Am I saying that nobody ever should attend a foreign school? Absolutely not. But similar to law school, most MBA programs are very overvalued and overpriced.
NB Note that I am most definitely not criticizing the need for high level managers - someone does have to do it, just that I personally have no interested in doing it as I'm too interested in actually doing stuff rather than managing other people doing stuff.
Edit: For the MBA track in a large organisation you probably are aiming at being at least the manager of the manager of the manager of the people who actually do stuff... ;-)
Lots of MBAs take that route out of consulting because they hate consulting but don't know what to do next. The internships & connections they make during the program help them decide, and frequently these decisions are to jump into a completely different industry. I consider it an expensive, but helpful, way for overachievers to figure out what they want to do with their life, and signal to future employers that they're serious about it.
I think when I was younger, I was more naïve. MBAs were for useless management drones, and you can easily get promoted to a management role without one.
Having gone through college, joined the industry, and then had friends who went on to business school, I'm seeing the MBA clan as more of an entirely different social strata. It's mostly signaling, but you move directly into higher-powered "important" roles that aren't really promotions over individual contributor work, but almost an entirely different industry.
There's no job guarantee with it, but still...
In my company we see Bachelors on the same level as people with just a "Ausbildung" in computer science. I also don't have a MBA or Bachelors and still got some job offers. It's just what you do. Actually in germany you can get a job really fast if you are into Scala / Java. Actually it won't make you rich, but it's good work and in Berlin there are a lot of companies searching for Scala Developers.
The only thing you will get a lot less than a MBA. When you would get the job of a MBA you will mostly get the same money he will get even when you have 5 years of experience.
>An advanced degree exemption is available for the first 20,000 petitions filed for a beneficiary who has obtained a U.S. master’s degree or higher. [0]
[0] https://www.uscis.gov/working-united-states/temporary-worker...
For me, I knew what I wanted to get out of it so it turned out well. Knowledge about business is everywhere and you're far better off trying to start a business if you actually want to learn about business.
What I got out of it was:
- Networks: Great friends from many different industries and skill sets
- Communication: Being tech and introverted, I learned how to communicate my ideas better. I've come to since realize that while your ideas might be the best, if you can't communicate it well, it's not going to be adopted. Also, different people require different communication styles.
- Self-awareness and emotional intelligence thinking: Lots of group work - teammates might be shitty and don't do anything. Figured out how to identify who's going to do work and who's not and how we're still going to deliver despite being handicapped.
- Strategy, frameworks, theories: Just helps with the thinking process. Helps me understand what executives are thinking about.
- Confidence: Wasn't born with a lot with confidence but going through presentations day in and day out helped me develop that.
I was able to switch from startups to large companies in different industries to get a greater understanding of the differences between the two. From this experience, it's no wonder why startups that try to sell to big companies usually have a tougher time than trying to sell to smaller companies (depending on industry of course).
I also recommend doing a Master's in a business field if you're 22 or so in a country where it makes sense. e.g. in continental europe it's pretty common to do a 3y bachelor from 18 to 21, and a 1y master's. The 1y master is a relatively small investment, and e.g. in the Netherlands where most unis are ranked top 100 worldwide, the cost of a 1y master's is about $2k. In 19/20 cases (making up a number), the added value of the learning/status/grit of this 1 year experience outweights the $2k+Opportunity-cost of spending this 1 year instead of working, it's an easy decision.
For anyone else? e.g. self-funding a $100k program, spending 1-3 years and having to forgo work (without company support) when you're in your 30s, probably not a great idea, on average. At that point the value is mostly learning, at a huge cost. And in my experience, self-study vs college-study in the field of business is terrific. The resources for self-study are gigantic, lots of great books, youtube videos per topic and entire courses from Harvard or MIT are online, including online testing environments where you can do exams, and lots of cases that you can buy and work through, all at a 1% cost of an expensive MBA. It's not exactly the same, particularly for a few business schools which are actually great and add value, but it's pretty damn close in most cases.
Unless you are from a top 15 college, it's not worth it.
"If you make major life decisions against your clear preference in a vague effort to please your parents, you will probably regret it."
Way too many people either try too hard to please their parents, or ignore their advice entirely. With time, you learn to not swing too much either way.
I did it while working full time, so I probably wouldn't do it again. For my profession as an executive it would've been more valuable to get a Bachelor of Laws instead.
How would knowledge of law, as opposed to having all-rounded knowledge of business administration and a network of people with similar backgrounds, help as an executive?
" You cannot impress Asian parents. Unhappiness is their default. And honestly, I believe they enjoy it."
This article could easily have been titled "Not all MBAs are created equal" and needed no further explanation.
"Business schools constantly boast about the network students can tap into. Don’t be fooled. Do you need to pay thousands to meet middle managers from industries that you have no interest in?"
I don't know about UK MBAs, but a cursory glance at the employment reports of any US MBA school will provide the names of companies that come on campus to recruit candidates. This is the first thing any prospective MBA student should be looking at when they're creating their shortlist of schools.
If you are looking to get into consulting, those schools should have McKinsey, Deloitte, Accenture and the like on there. If you're interested in technology, Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. should be coming on campus. For finance, Goldman, JP Morgan, etc. An so on and so forth.
If those names, or other high-profile names aren't on the list, you may not get your money's worth. An MBA has never been about the quality of the education you get, but rather about name recognition and how much pull the school has with recruiters. This is common knowledge for anybody doing even an hour's research into whether an MBA is right for them.
That's the biggest flaw of this write-up. The writer appears to have done little to no research on his program before enrolling, and considers his support officer saying "you should have had all the money sorted" to be some sort of cold-world realization, which is absurdly irresponsible when you consider how much an MBA costs.
I don't like using the word "entitled" to describe people, but I have to wonder about the conclusions he reaches about his teammates who didn't speak English well. They ended up in management consultancies, while he, the heroic working man struggling to teach them English, is interning at the Economist, a position that usually goes to undergraduates. Perhaps he should stop to consider that maybe they got their jobs because they attempted to network more, or simply showed up to their interviews without a chip on their shoulder as this writer seems to have.
My post-MBA job probably could have been gotten without an MBA. There could have been other things I did over those three years of evening classes to improve specific skills. However, having the MBA on my resume expands the types of companies that would hire me for senior management positions. A lot of job postings in my area are still MBA-preferred. It may not be like that in younger companies or higher-growth cities, so I understand why this type of content ends on on HN frequently.
Other schools: they have morning MBA, evening MBA, weekend MBA, Dubai MBA, San Francisco MBA, International MBA, Exec MBA, etc. These schools are just minting like thousands of MBAs every year. Next time, expect your scrum master to be an MBA.
Pretty much the same as for-profit schools getting non-useful degrees (I might be ok with someone getting a medical tech degree or something like that, even at the cost of loans, from a non-selective for-profit school). Same as bottom-tier law schools for employability.
This is even more true for MBAs. Had the author gone to Harvard or Stanford, the opportunity that MBA would have afforded him would have easily justified the 2 years it took to get it. There is more to this than just the value in money. For example, most people would rather work on cutting edge technology at a major corporation that pays less than some small engineering firm that says works on infrastructure projects. The major corporation will be looking for that top 20 MBA, and you will never have that opportunity (unless again you are an outlier) without that universities reputation to back you.
And for those who say this may be discriminatory, just remember that it is very difficult to judge people in the late 20's or even early 30s on just pure experience and accomplishment because you are still very young career wise to have built up any notable portfolio of experience. That is why your educations is so critical.
Be really go at "doing" stuff (as in owning and delivering output) and then as one advances they become able to inspire others to do stuff too and inflict positive change in a company. That's what makes a good manager, not an MBA.
Also in my observation the people going for MBAs largely wanted to tick the "advanced degree" box but weren't in a position to get an advanced degree in a 'real' subject. That's what led to the mass proliferation of programs that has really significantly devalued the MBA overall.
MBAs make sense in some cases. It's a good way to change career path. Bankers and consultants use it as a break after two or three hellish years as a junior. Knowing all these middle managers in other industries is actually very useful, to keep an eye on what is going on or sell them stuff, and providing opportunities for future career changes. For others it is a way to "upgrade" a modest academic education.
But enrolling in one of these things without having any clue of what to expect from it or just because of peer pressure is a waste of time and money. But the fault lies with the applicant.
Before the Internet, if you remember, when we tried to create services, what you would do is you'd create the hardware layer and the network layer and the software and it would cost millions of dollars to do anything that was substantial. So when it costs millions of dollars to do something substantial, what you would do is you'd get an MBA who would write a plan and get the money from V.C.s or big companies, and then you'd hire the designers and the engineers, and they'd build the thing. This is the Before Internet, B.I., innovation model.
https://www.ted.com/talks/joi_ito_want_to_innovate_become_a_...
I know a surprisingly high amount of people who hold less than a 4 year bachelor's in Comp Sci or related who now hold significant positions in major companies.
Yeah you're not going to suddenly come out of an MBA as a master of the universe, but you're going to learn some cool topics, immerse yourself in your choice of extra-curriculars, meet some amazing people, and have a surprisingly enjoyable experience.
I can honestly say, engineering is much more taxing on the brain than business. It’s hard to even call it learning, when what you’re doing is just reading through some cleaned up summaries of what various businesses did. Mostly it seemed like storytime, with companies instead of fairies. You better watch out, or you’ll get leapfrogged! As if people in the old businesses hadn’t considered that. In general there was a lot of dressing things up as complicated when really the truth was probably that the firms did what they could with the information they had. Mintzberg probably sticks out as the best guy to describe how decisions are really made.
Looking back, there was also a real lack of practical business skills being taught. The main thing I would teach is some form of agile management. Or any kind of practical how-to-organize a group to do something. Without a guide on the nitty gritty, you end up having a strange birds-eye view of the business, with no idea how to get towards your goal. In my career working practices have made the biggest difference to what strategies could be followed.
At the end of the day my cynical side says they are reasonably expensive (if you're at a good one and the people you meet are interesting) and overly long networking events.
I guess they are geared towards people who want to work in corporations after all (and are usually sponsored by a company) but I can't help but think that taking the money and spending the time ramen-noodling some idea will teach you more valuable lessons. For the networking you could also wander around SV kungfu master style and talk to random people in coffee shops for a couple of units of time.
It's basically all about the certification (more or less) which is what I'd say is a fundamental issue about education in general. You can self-learn a lot of things but not self-certify.
The quality of MBA programs vary drastically. An MBA from Phoenix (an online university) costs quite a lot and you will not be recruited into high paying positions. An MBA from MIT's Sloan School of Management also costs quite a lot, but you will be heavily recruited by big companies and offered nice salaries. The difference starts in the quality of their admissions. Phoenix University lets in anyone who can pay. MIT only lets in the top folks (who can also pay or can figure out a way for someone else to pay for them). Because MIT starts out with higher quality people they run a more rigorous program and the top businesses recognize that MIT graduates are worth more than graduates from diploma mills. There are other great business schools other than MIT, I'm just using them as an example. This phenomenon is also seen in the financial world, a finance degree from an Ivy league school is literally worth tens of thousands of dollars more than a public university because that is all the big financial firms want to hire.
This might be confusing to people in the software world where you rise based on merit, but in the business world a degree is not just a piece of paper but a pedigree; and your pedigree matters a lot.
An MBA is not a magical piece of paper that will guarantee success. However, it will definitely give you the resources and the network to change your trajectory. You still have to work really hard at it.
At any of the top schools, there's more competition among the students for recruiting (for many coveted industries: e.g. IB, PE, Consulting, Tech etc) because that's where everyone wants to go.
If you're pursuing something non-traditional then you might want to rethink the need to go to one of the top schools
You're not guaranteed a position just by going to the school and there is definitely a bias towards a lot of bigger companies recruiting at only the Top 10-15 schools unless you can really network your way to the top.
The MBA is just another data point people use to qualify your candidacy. It's all about risk management and just like there is a bias towards a Harvard/Stanford/MIT grad or Google/FB engineers (this is what a lot of startups list on their site) the MBA is an indicator.
Outside of the brand, I still do think you learn a lot in the class setting (working with diverse teams who come from different backgrounds and the ability to work on projects and consult in industries you've never worked in is a great learning experience)
But the experience from this article sounds very different from what my wife is going through. You can't do her MBA while working at a bar; you need to have a job at a significant company where you have access to financial data and other stuff. She does the assignments on her own, because she's got to do it in her spare time between job and family. I suppose her course is explicitly not aimed at regular just-after-highschool students, but at working professionals who need some extra theoretical foundation.
Whether any specific class has new information for her varies wildly. The challenge seems to be more in the right way to write a research paper than in the actual subject matter, though translating financial and bookkeeping between English (from the books) and Dutch (everywhere else) can also be a challengen.
I've held off and have done well for it, often the job I wanted wasn't what it looked like and better opportunities came along with networking and aiming at the jobs I knew were great fits.
Those I've spoken to have described Wash U in St Louis as mainly international students and a big group of bitter Boeing employees who don't get 100% of it paid for anymore like previous employees did. My company offers less than the cost of a single class for the entire year since there was no correlation with loyalty.
I'm still torn though, always feels like the grass is greener on the other side.
Full disclosure - my company worked on his site.
This line gave me a pretty good chuckle.
When it comes to business, invoices are one of the easiest things to get right, and yet so many fail. Makes you wonder about their business nous on other topics.
