Slashdot Mirror
'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.
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.
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.
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.
Couldn't have happened to a nicer degree.
Check your premises.
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.
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'