Posted on 10/05/2010 7:10:54 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
If Josh Kaufman had gone to business school, he probably would have graduated this year with an MBA from Harvard or Stanford. But Kaufman, a 28-year-old entrepreneur and former assistant brand manager for Procter & Gamble, thinks business school is pretty much a waste of time and money.
MBA programs, he says firmly, have become so expensive that students "must effectively mortgage their lives" and take on "a crippling burden of debt" to get what is "mostly a worthless piece of paper." Kaufman believes that MBA programs "teach many worthless, outdated, even outright damaging concepts and practices." And if that's not bad enough, he insists that an MBA won't guarantee anyone a high-paying job, let alone turn a person into a skilled manager or leader.
In an era when MBA bashing has become almost fashionable, Kaufman is emerging as business school's most unforgiving critic. Founder of PersonalMBA.com and the author of the forthcoming book "The Personal MBA," he's a passionate advocate for what he calls self-education. Instead of paying up to $350,000 in tuition and forgone earnings to go to Harvard, Stanford or Wharton, Kaufman says a better way to learn business is to open the pages of classic business texts and learn on your own.
His epiphany occurred five years ago, when he was working at P&G (PG, Fortune 500) headquarters in Cincinnati as an assistant brand manager for the company's Home Care division. He had joined P&G straight from the University of Cincinnati by virtue of the school's cooperative education program. Almost all of his peers and managers boasted elite MBA degrees.
To overcome his feelings of intimidation and to prepare for the job, he began reading, and reading, and reading, from textbooks, such as the "Essentials of Accounting," to "Competitive Strategy" by Harvard professor Michael Porter
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
I also agree and disagree. I have a technical undergraduate degree and went back for an MBA. At the time, there weren’t many women in the technical fields, and I needed to have a competitive edge. I went part time for the MBA, and after I got it, decided that I didn’t like working at big companies where my future was limited.
I went into business for myself and kept on learning through the years. My MBA, along with the technical degrees, gave me a wide breadth of knowledge (I made sure that every course I took was practical), and gave me credentials that were impressive to people when that mattered.
The world changes, so people have to keep learning, but that paper can be worth something.
I didn’t go into debt to get my degree. I took my time and saved my money up front so that I could pay for it without going into debt. It took sacrifice on my part. I’m glad I did it.
The real point is he wouldn't have been hired by P&G if he had not gone to a 4 year college(he is technically elite compared to someone without college- doesn't make him better or brighter). The same holds true for MBA's, companies are conditioned to hire them, as they are conditioned to hire College grads.
I went to college for the piece of paper, I knew what they were teaching I didn't want to learn...Liberal state school(cost factor).
Education has rigged the system, either you play or you don't.
We can all strive to be Bill Gates.
I could not agree more about the MBA. During my undergrad I had MBA students in my class (our nomenclature was 401 was senior undergrad, and the same class was labeled as 601 for grad students, or 301 for junior undergrad and 501 for 1st year grad students). They read the same book as me (probably for the second time as they took the same class as undergads), attended the same lectures as me, and only had to do a few extra papers than I did (took the same tests with the same questions as me). Now maybe they also had classes that were for grads only, but all of my undergrad classes had the 301/501 or 401/601 (finance, accounting, mgmt). So in my junior year of undergrad I realized what a racket the MBA was.
“That depends on the school and the program” I think it mostly depends on the individual. Someone who has “wonder” will learn. One who doesn’t won’t. If you wonder how things work and why they are what they are, you will learn.
A degree in a structured program is one way to do this, I’ve found. I came out of an undergraduate ChE program in the 60’s. When I started to work I was somewhat intimidated in my first job by how business worked, so I took an accounting course. The instructor suggested when I did well that I take the GRE and enroll in their MBA program. I did and found it did a good job of helping me with the non-technical parts of my job. I particularly liked the Finance courses and these proved valuable later when I bought a business.
I might have done this without an MBA but I’m not sure I would have had the confidence.
An MBA is no substitute for experience in the trenches. The MBA is background that allows a person to understand what is going on from a deeper context. Look at it this way: a driver’s ed class teaches teenagers the basics of how to drive so they can get a license, but they are not experts in driving. They now know the rules of the road.
The MBA is just like that. People with MBAs know some of the rules of the road, but there is no replacement for time behind the wheel gaining experience. Both are necessary! The sons should not have been turned loose without the experience part, and learning from their family’s success.
Webster University has a terrific MBA program. The MBA grad school is (rhetorically speaking) bomb throwing, “follow the money and create your own company”. Which I am doing now. I would not have done it without that education from that particular school.
It is a great program.
SHOULD READ:
Webster University has a terrific MBA program. The MBA grad school is (rhetorically speaking) bomb throwing, CATO Institute libertarian. The message of the school is “follow the money and create your own company”. Which I am doing now. I would not have done it without that education from that particular school.
It is a great program
I was referring to the larger phenomenon of second generation failure, not the smaller phenomenon of second generation MBA driven failure.
That was the original intent of the MBA. My undergraduate degree was Microbiology. My MBA was extremely beneficial for a good background in accounting, finance and marketing. I still use so much of what I learned in my MBA program.
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