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'The Death of the MBA' (axios.com)

Posted by msmash on from the patterns-emerge dept.

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.

12 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Fuck the universities by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    They are money-hungry businesses first and foremost. They operate like cults.

    I hope universities are the next to go!

    1. Re:Fuck the universities by Opportunist · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Well, we have arrived at the point where you cannot recover the cost for a degree a while ago, where it's actually going to net you more money in the end when you learn a trade and starting to work basically when you get out of school rather than continuing to a university and start at 25-28 with a mountain of debt on your back.

      Eventually people will most likely say "fuck that" and turn their back to universities, realizing that they're better off in the end starting at a lower level entry position. In the end, your degree doesn't really mean much, you don't start as high as someone with one but where you end up, and at what age, depends more on how good you really are.

      --
      We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
    2. Re:Fuck the universities by tripleevenfall · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I know MBAs are a favorite punching bag on Slashdot, but my experience in getting one was very positive.

      *However*, it's not something that is going to directly result in a pay raise or a new job opportunity, like a bachelor's degree might. Most people don't see the value in an MBA because you can't immediately and directly monetize it, but that doesn't mean it has no value.

      I feel like I learned more about business during my MBA than I did in all my undergraduate years, and I use more of that knowledge every day than anything I learned by studying irrelevant classes the university foisted on my 19 year old brain, which has since forgotten them.

      Like I said, I know /. hates MBAs, but not everything valuable can be easily and immediately quantified.

    3. Re:Fuck the universities by Moheeheeko · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Also never underestimate parents pushing their kids to get a degree. A majority of families consider it a failing that their kid doesn't go to college and get a degree.

    4. Re:Fuck the universities by HornWumpus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      MBAs aren't universally air thieves. Of the fifty or so I've worked with, one wasn't an idiot.

      --
      John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
  2. Over supply by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I think that part of the problem with the MBA is that for a while it seemed like everybody was fucking getting one. Laws of supply and demand suggest that would cause the value to diminish unless the demand was increasing similarly. I think the market is just coming around to this realization and reacting in accordance to establish a new equilibrium around what everyone believes is closer to the real value of an MBA.

  3. Winner Takes All by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The MBA schools promoted the ideology of Winner Takes Everything, Cut All Corners, Cook All Books, Outsource the Universe, Price Over Value, Chare the Taxpayer, and Magic Algorithms will Solve Everything.

    May they roast slowly in the hell to which they have reduced our inheritance.

    1. Re:Winner Takes All by youngone · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They also teach students to care about nothing but the short-term bottom line and screw long-term side effects...

      That's pretty much what I heard from a friend who was sent to do an MBA by her employer. She decided it was valuable education, because it taught her pretty much what not to do, as a manager with ~15 years experience.

  4. Market oversaturated, culling begins by Koreantoast · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not surprised. MBA programs, like Law programs, were setup left and right by universities as cheap ways to raise funds: they command high tuition while requiring minimal in terms of capital expenditures (compared to say, an engineering program that requires substantial capital for labs and whatnot). Now that the market has become saturated with lawyers and MBA's, people are getting more selective, and the programs without strong reputations will wither away. Add on top of that fewer companies are paying to send their talented employees to get MBA's and the general weakening of the i-banking field, and we just simply don't need as many as we used to have.

  5. MBAs are dangerous by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    MBAs who are ignorant of what customers need and want generate short term profits at the expense of long term success. They don't know how to measure or put a price on customer happiness, and often trade customer happiness for some increase in profit. They aren't aware that what customers are really buying is happiness.

  6. Couldn't have happened to a nicer degree. by forkfail · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Couldn't have happened to a nicer degree.

    --
    Check your premises.
  7. And nothing of value was lost... by slew · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Seriously, most businesses don't need to be "administered". Administrating is for the conglomerates, and although I'm sure conglomerates need new canon fodder to back-fill their management ranks, it certainly doesn't have the number of chairs to support the multitude of MBA conferring organizations that are out there today. Even among huge conglomerates long McDonalds and Costco, they often draw their executives from line workers not freshly minted MBAs...

    For the non-conglomerate business, the reason they often fail is for lack of vision, not lack of administration...

    As for the "accounting" MBAs, well, do we need to engineer more Joint Energy Development Investment Limited Partnerships, or ChewCos?

    As for the "finance" MBAs, well, do conglomerates need more leveraged buyouts, or engineer more Credit Default Swaps?

    As for these second tier MBA schools that can't attract students? Nothing of value was lost...