ping MBA
have become so expensive that students “must effectively mortgage their lives””
I don’t disagree with this at all...but I am still perplexed why these programs (and colleges, generally, including expensive private undergrad colleges) are bursting at the seams. of course easy credit / cash makes it appear “free”...but surely...at some point, the reality of debt has to sink in?
Interesting read.
I started my MBA last year and threw in the towel after the second semester.
It was a complete waste of time and rehash of what I had already learned as a manager.
I felt it was a better use of time to actually investigate business opportunities than to have another acronym after my name.
Besides, my PMP is worth more than a MBA in the current market...
The MBA craze was really picking up in the eighties (along with the yuppie culture). Engineers going into management were advised to forget everything technical, and play the game. I was working for a German owned, German run company at the time that specialized in steel mill machinery (hint: no more casting ingots). Management there did not think highly of MBA’s. The president of the company was a Dr. Ing. (Doctorate in Engineering), and contradicted the “conventional wisdom” of technical competence and business sense being mutually exclusive.
“Schooling” vs “Education”
Having spent 8 years in graduate school working on my PhD I can attest to the fact that universities have become centers of indoctrination. Rather than teach pragmatic learning and open mindedness they promote ideological purity. We need to get back to practical learning and things that are empirically proven to work. Universities have become merely places where professors sit around validating their distorted ideas and ideologies rather than promote the investigation of truth.
I believe someone who has an MBA that also has a technical BS degree, such as a BSEE or BSME, is still very marketable.
bttt
I agree and disagree.
I finished my MBA in the middle 90’s, and it did open some doors for me, same as my PMP. For most students though, it’s nuts to think that you will retain all the facts from twenty 1000 page textbooks, and all the assignments. But what it did teach me, as both corporate manager and entrepreneur/business owner, was to look at and understand at the complete business landscape, and make decisions accordingly.
Now the question is whether I could have reached the same level of understanding by self-studying the texts...and I would say that since I keep studying texts and books anyway, the answer would be mostly yes.
As long as you need to learn something rather than to have a degree, you can do a better job teaching yourself than by going to a school
Once the school convinces you that you need their certification to be successful, their job is done.
Delivering education is a cost to them, and they will lower it at every opportunity. In short, once they have your money, they don't care if you learn anything.
MBA programs were designed for people who wasted their undergraduate opportunities on liberal fluff; a crash course on Business topics. Put that on top of a Sociology or EDU indoctrination, and it's like the white stuff on top of chicken poop (it's still chicken poop).
This is a rather timely posting for our family - husband has a senior military backgrd - very successful - but now seems “stuck” in defense contracting arena. We’ve been discussing wether a MBA would “break him out” of the defense world so he could do something different for the last few decades of working life.
I think anyone in any field would jump at his expertise - he feels they don’t “get” military life and want more specific experience...what to do?
My program was through a state college, but the textbooks and materials were from the Harvard Business School. The books cost as much as the tuition.
The last 3 firms I worked for (all were very large and in business for 50+ years) had been turned over from fathers to their sons who had just completed their MBAs.
Two of these firms were privately held while the third had a majority stockholder turn his controlling interest over to his son.
In all 3 cases, these successful companies went bankrupt in 3 years or less.
Now it is either sons are failures at running a business started by their fathers (some truth to that) or there is something seriously wrong with the MBA programs.
In all 3 cases, the MBAs completely ignored what had made the companies prosper and immediately started to manage strictly by the bottom line.
Customers, who in some cases paid a higher price to do business with these companies simply because of the great service provided, started to leave in droves once the service either deteriorated or eliminated.
I can only assume nothing in the MBA programs teach students to focus on the core values or services of a company.
At this point I have zero respect for MBA programs.