Free Republic

If your career plan is to become a hedge fund trader or play some other role in the financial services business, you probably need an MBA just as the price of admission. If that's you, don't bother reading this post. For everyone else, you may be considering an MBA program as a way to increase your business acumen, enhance your personal brand, and make yourself more competitive. If that's the case, there may be some cheaper and better alternatives. Let's run some quick numbers. Tuition and fees for a two year degree program at a top private college will cost...

You may have heard that the government is forcing businesses not to discriminate. It isn’t. If you chose to run a business, you have to follow the laws. If you don’t, that’s a choice—and you choose to suffer the consequences. Still, in the wake of the controversy surrounding Indiana’s law, conservatives don’t see it that way. Even potential Republican presidential candidates are getting in on the assertions. Rick Santorum recently said: If you’re a print shop and you are a gay man, should you be forced to print ‘God Hates Fags’ for the Westboro Baptist Church because they hold those...

(Poets&Quants) — What’s an MBA degree really worth? And how much more money does an MBA from Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton get you over a career than one from Texas A&M, Ohio State, or the University of Iowa?Those are questions that perplex and confound many deciding whether to get the degree and, if so, where to get it from. Not everyone can get into the most highly selective business schools. So many candidates have to face the question over whether it’s worth getting the MBA from a second- or even third-tier school.A new analysis done exclusively for Poets&Quants by...

Have we gone stark raving mad? The question is brought to mind by the new gun law signed last week in Georgia by Gov. Nathan Deal. You might have thought that since the United States couldn't possibly have more permissive firearms laws than it does now, nothing more could be done to coddle the gun lobby and tip the balance of our statutes away from law enforcement. Alas, you would be wrong. The creativity of the National Rifle Association and other organizations devoted to establishing conditions in which every man, woman and child in our nation will have to be...

From Phil Robertson to Megyn Kelly, peddling white grievance became a bigger, crazier, more lucrative racket. Maybe it was the very fact of enjoying a wonderful Christmas with my family and friends, against the manufactured backlash to a nonexistent “War on Christmas,” that let me appreciate the perilous mental state of a small but noisy and paranoid swath of white America. Somehow over the holiday it became clear: 2013 was the year white grievance mongering became an uglier and even more lucrative racket. Fox News has been peddling the phony “War on Christmas” for years, of course, but it...

Many would-be MBAs expect a salary after graduation that's far in excess of what they can hope for. The average US MBA student expects to earn $140,000 on graduating, a 240% increase from the average current pre-enrollment salary of $58,000, according to a survey by QS TopMBA.com, The reality? Payscale puts the median for grads with 4 or less years of experience at $55,779, and $71,920 for those with 5-9 years. Graduates of top schools can usually still expect 6 figures. MBA salaries have been flat for some time now as graduates price themselves out of many industries, traditionally lucrative...

Bush’s legacy keeps getting worse By Eugene Robinson, Published: April 25 In retrospect, George W. Bush’s legacy doesn’t look as bad as it did when he left office. It looks worse. I join the nation in congratulating Bush on the opening of his presidential library in Dallas. Like many people, I find it much easier to honor, respect and even like the man — now that he’s no longer in the White House. But anyone tempted to get sentimental should remember the actual record of the man who called himself The Decider. Begin with the indelible stain that one of...

I SAW “Argo” with Jerry Rafshoon, who was a top aide to President Carter during the Iranian hostage crisis, when six Americans escaped and were given sanctuary for three months by courageous Canadian diplomats. We were watching a scene where a C.I.A. guy can’t get through to Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff, to sign off on plane tickets for the escaping hostages, so he pretends to be calling from the school where Jordan’s kids go. “Hamilton wasn’t married then and didn’t have any kids,” Jerry whispered, inflaming my pet peeve about filmmakers who make up facts in stories about...

If Columbia Business School Dean Glenn Hubbard were to advise his McKinsey-bound son on where to get his MBA, Hubbard says there are only four or five programs that he would recommend. He declines to mention the schools by name, but you can rest assured that Columbia would be on the list along with Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton. That leaves a lot of very good schools off the list. Hubbard is an economist by training. He joined Columbia in 1988, after beginning his teaching career at Northwestern. He was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under President George Bush...

Like many students, Steve Vonderweidt hoped that a master's degree in business administration would open doors to a new job with a higher paycheck. But now, about eight months after receiving his M.B.A. from the University of Louisville, Mr. Vonderweidt, 36 years old, hasn't been able to find a job in the private sector, and continues to work as an administrator at a social-service agency that helps Louisville residents obtain food stamps, health care and other assistance. He is saddled with about $75,000 in student-loan debt—much of it from graduate school. "It was a really great program," says Mr. Vonderweidt....

Want to get into business school? Be employable. As schools focus more attention on their job-placement numbers, several M.B.A. programs are now bringing in career-services staff to evaluate candidates for admission and set expectations for prospective students on what the school can, and can't, do in an uncertain job market. Business schools have long considered applicants' career goals, though admissions staff rarely sought input from the career office on whether a particular candidate's aims were realistic. But when the financial crisis upended the banking sector and sure-thing jobs on Wall Street disappeared, schools began formally tying input (applicants) to output...

The admissions department at Harvard Business School asked me to write a reflection on my first semester for the Class of 2015 pre-matriculation blog. Here’s what I sent in. I hope it gives an insight into what I’ve experienced the last four months. In summary, I’m loving every moment. Come visit me in the Spring semester if you’d like to see HBS for yourself! A Letter to the HBS Class of 2015 A Review of the First Semester of Harvard Business School By Ryan Allis, Class of 2014, Section F ____________________________ December 17, 2012 Dear Future Friend, Congratulations on getting...

Stanford's Graduate School of Business has leapfrogged the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and Columbia Business School to become the most expensive two-year MBA program in the world, according to an analysis by Poets&Quants. This year, Stanford is telling applicants that estimated cost of its two-year, full-time MBA program is a whopping $185,054, a new record. That is some $18,242 more than Stanford said it would cost an MBA student only two years ago, when Columbia was the school with the most expensive MBA program in the world. At that time, Columbia estimated that the cost to attend its MBA...

As he tries to engineer a comeback in this week's presidential debate, President Barack Obama needs to recognize two things. First, when it comes to politics, Mitt Romney treats himself as a product, not a person. Second, Republicans cannot defend their proposals in terms that are acceptable to a majority of voters. Romney, Ryan and the entire right know that their most deeply held belief – the one on which they won't compromise – is rejected by the vast majority of Americans. That's their faith that every problem in the economy and in society can be solved by throwing more...

Justice Antonin Scalia needs to resign from the Supreme Court. He’d have a lot of things to do. He’s a fine public speaker and teacher. He’d be a heck of a columnist and blogger. But he really seems to aspire to being a politician — and that’s the problem. So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did this week, when the court announced its decision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of...

B-school grad Joe Mihalic went on an extreme financial diet to pay down over $90,000 in debt in just seven months and charted his story through an anonymous blogging project. When he graduated from the Harvard Business School three years ago this month, the economy was a wreck. Nearly one in four of his classmates didn't have a job at graduation in May 2009. Yet, Joe Mihalic, then 26, was able to land a job with Dell (DELL) in Austin, Texas, at twice as much as the $52,000 a year he made before earning his MBA. But there was some...

It's understandable if unfortunate that the controversy surrounding the killing of Trayvon Martin has polarized the country along both racial and ideological lines. But there is one issue that should not have any racial connotations: the urgency of repealing "Stand Your Ground" laws. And leave it to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to speak the blunt truth about why these laws are dangerous -- and why the National Rifle Association keeps pushing them anyway. "In reality," Bloomberg said in a speech before the National Press Club last week, "the NRA's leaders weren't interested in public safety. They were interested in...

Maureen Dowd is a woman of many talents. She is, of course, a New York Times featured columnist, a Pulitzer Prize winning commentator, and the liberals acknowledged Queen of Snark. Ms. Dowd has also completely blown a gasket, if her column of last week (April 5th) is any indication of her psychological-emotional state. In her column of last week entitled, Men In Black, Maureen employs language and phraseology that her fellow liberals would quickly label “hate speech” if it were uttered by their foes. Ms. Dowd assails the Supreme Court in the most personal and vitriolic terms for their...

WASHINGTON — How dare President Barack Obama brush back the Supreme Court like that? Has this former constitutional law instructor no respect for our venerable system of checks and balances? Nah. And why should he? This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word, is well on its way to becoming one of the most divisive in modern U.S. history. It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes. All...

Go ahead, call it shooting fish in a barrel. As soon as Ed Schultz mentioned at the top of his MSNBC show this evening that Alan Grayson would be a guest, you knew the former Dem congressman from Florida would say something outrageous. Sure enough, the guy who was roundly defeated last time around—but is giving it another go—delivered, claiming that Newt Gingrich is running "the most overtly racist campaign" since George Wallace. Grayson also managed to work in a reference to the Ten Commandment's prohibition of adultery. View the video here.