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'The Death of the MBA' (axios.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. graduate business schools -- once magnets for American and international students seeking a certain route to a high income -- are in an existential crisis. They are losing droves of students who are balking at sky-high tuition and, in the case of international applicants, turned off by President Trump's politics. The once-venerated MBA is going the way of the diminished law degree, pushed aside by tech education. Graduates of the top 25 or so MBA schools still command the elite Wall Street and corporate jobs they always did, but the hundreds of others are scrambling, and some schools are shutting down their programs. Survivors are often offering new touchy-feely degrees like "master of social innovation." [...] In the more than 350 programs that didn't make the top ranks, rising tuition costs and smaller returns in the form of employment and income have forced a rethink of the traditional MBA degree.
Like an MBA could ever build a mining rig.
I got my MBA a few years ago from the local Really Expensive Private University, when 40 was just around the corner and I wanted to add another leg to my stool before I became "old" by tech-world standards. I very much value the body of knowledge that I learned, but there are several serious problems with the people chasing and offering it today.
A MBA is like a can of car wax. If you put it on a Corvette, you'll make something great. If you put it on a turd, all you'll have is a shiny turd. I have a STEM degree + 15 years in HPC, and I think the MBA definitely helped me make better, wiser decisions.
By contrast, there were several "MBA's" (in the Dilbertesque sense) in the MBA program right out of central casting. They couldn't write a line of code, couldn't turn a wrench, couldn't do anything useful, but they had executive hair, wore fancy suits, and constantly "networked" and looked for "synergy". They wanted a MBA strictly as a gateway to wealth and power.
They're aided and abetted by universities who are fighting to break into the game. Why shouldn't they? It's relatively low cost (doesn't require expensive labs or facilities like STEM does), people will throw mortgage-size checks at you for the privilege of attending, and you might luck up and get a rich alumni who donates back someday. And they kept raising tuition every year, faster than inflation, faster than salaries grew.
My cousin graduated with a law degree right when the law market crashed, and I recognized similar signs of doom creeping into the MBA field. Just like the bloom in law schools, there was a bloom in MBA schools, from tiny never-heard-of-them-before private universities and on-line schools, taking cash from every marginal MBA student-wanna-be out there.
I don't regret getting my MBA, even though I haven't seen much more than cost-of-living increases since graduation. I learned a tremendous amount and enjoyed it a lot (there can be economic geeks just as much as science geeks or IT geeks). And I made a substantial chunk of change on the stock market using what I knew. But with a MBA from a good school costing $100k nowadays, you're much better off just taking $300 to the local used book store and reading them.
The MBA wasn't a "gateway to wealth" because of the degree itself, but because of the caliber of student trying to attain it. I'm sure the same type of people who chase an IT degree for wealth in the 90's and chased a JD/MBA for wealth in the 00's will find another degree to chase and run into the ground soon enough. My bet is on "data science". I already see a few junior varsity universities in our area offering a degree to any comer who can code in BASIC, and I'm sure DeVry's and University of Phoenix will be offering a degree soon enough.
They also teach students to care about nothing but the short-term bottom line and screw long-term side effects. The idea is to use the higher profits to jump ship to a higher paying job before the damage you've done to the company becomes evident. (No, I'm not an MBA, but I was told this by one of the few good ones I've ever met.)
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As a self-taught "administrator" who's run two small businesses, I'd have to disagree. There is in fact quite a bit to learn about running a business - accounting, legal (especially labor and tax codes), organizational, employee management, etc.
However, I'd say about 80% of this would be better suited taught in a high-school level course. The accounting is virtually identical to running your personal finances, just a lot more formal. Everyone has to pay taxes and occasionally deal with a legal infraction or subpeona. Organizational skills and how to accept and/or delegate responsibility is something that everyone should learn. And managing people (working with, encouraging, watching out for, detecting problems, reprimanding) is important at a family and relationship level too.
The remaining stuff specific to running a business, I'd say you could pick up from a few night courses at your local adult community college. Or in my case, by asking an accountant friend and a lawyer friend a lot of questions, and listening to advice from someone who'd actually taken employee management courses. There are lots of little facts and tidbits (e.g. what percentage of your budget should be going to payroll or marketing? How do you calculate and deduct payroll taxes? What documentation do I need to collect and submit when I hire an employee?) which have very specific answers but aren't all located in a single easy-to-find place. One thing you learn pretty quickly running your own business is that time is your most valuable resource. And if you can get a neatly organized reference which answers most of these questions for a few thousand dollars, it's well worth paying for it just because it saves you the time of stumbling around the web trying to find it all yourself.
Just how many did we need to begin with? In a lot of cases I've seen (perhaps the majority), MBA education did more harm than good. They instilled exaggerated self-esteem, an overrated appreciation of one's abilities, and the idea that the world can be run by Excel sheets.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Nicely put, utterly wrong. The original US MBA Programs didn't come out of the Business or Engineering Schools; they were a supplement to traditionally low budget Humanities Studies. Just moldy books and blackboards.
"This school of business and public administration was originally conceived as a school for diplomacy and government service on the model of the French Ecole des Sciences Politiques. The goal was an institution of higher learning that would offer a master of arts degree in the humanities field, with a major in business."- Wikipedia about Harvard.
Sometime during the Seventies, led by Harvard and followed gleefully by nearly everybody else, MBA Programs shifted from an emphasis on Public Administration to one of utter greed, by everybody involved. In other words, the rise of the "Austrian School" of Economics, and a deemphasis on "Planned Economies". The original MBAs were supposed to be career, non-political, Government Bureaucrats, and not Wall Street Raiders and HR Parasites.
So we have this odd situation where a Party with largely Libertarian leanings are against soaring Public Expenditures and long-term Public Debt... but only when they aren't in charge. (Their Disloyal Opposition has no coherent Economic Philosophies; well, not since the last Roosevelt.) An emphasis only on short-term results.
MBAs, like Lawyers, now have this general reputation of being professional Assholes, only out for themselves. It's no way to run a Government, and as Corporations are learning, it's no way to run a Business.