Business School is a Joke

For a different point of view.

Coming from an engineering background, I sat in on an entrepreneurship class at UChicago Booth and I was totally blown away.

The angle was completely different. The previous class the students were all given the details about hypothetical ventures with some background on the market and they were asked to say whether they would invest or not invest should such a proposal cross their desk.

Then the class I was in, the big twist was that a lot of the ventures were real, and the founders were there that day.

The experience of being there when a room full of really bright and really accomplished kids learned that the company that 9/10 had passed on became a multi-million dollar success was priceless (and vice-versa). The message was unmistakeable.

Regarding the student body: I struck up a conversation with an enrolled student next to me, and it turns out the guy was one of the first 10 employees at ICQ. Pretty cool.

Take which anecdote (mine or the author's) you will. Also consider that the author's program was an undergraduate program and try to remember how experienced or useful you were at 18-21.

I have been on both sides of this feeling. In my freshman and sophomore year, I believed school was crap. Here are the feelings and attitudes I had:

1. school can't teach me much

2. I already know so much

3. Gosh why am I here?

4. Am I ever going to use this?

I was so turned off by the busi100 classes that I gave up even applying for business. Instead, I chose the easiest major on campus(communications) in hopes that I can quickly get my degree requirements and then drop in to higher level busi classes bypassing the annoying b-school prerequisites.

So after sophomore year I took a 3 semester break. During that time, I was working on my startup and living life as a non-student. It is also when I realized the holes in my "skillset"(for a lack of better word). I returned to school with a new attitude: I am going to nitpick classes to fill up the obvious holes.

My attitude upon return:

1. I have stuff to learn

2. I will take very specific classes fill up specific holes

3. I don't expect the class in itself to teach me as much as for it to provoke thought in me

My experience has been a complete opposite since return. I have learned a tonne from a few specific classes(sales management, market strat, market analysis). I am a startup guy. So when I say learned, I am talking about very practical shit that I am putting to use right now.

It's all about the attitude IMO. A subtle thing I realized: the classes in itself might not teach you but they can provoke thought in you that pushes you to learn specific stuff yourself that you wouldn't have known about.

If you think school can't teach you anything, take time off! It'll validate or invalidate your thinking.

I feel the HN title is a touch misleading - when I hear B-school, I think MBA, maybe that's just me. The fact that this is undergrad is significant. In my opinion, thought leaders, both from the external 'business' world as well as top professors, often feel it is a waste of their time teaching undergrads, many of whom are there because it is what one is supposed to do (ie. go out and get an education) rather than because they really want to, and have paid out of their own pocket, to be there, which is most often the case with MBA's.

I know that in my Computer Science undergrad, while I was interested in learning, I was more interested in living the student life. I just recently finished an MBA and while it fell short on some fronts, the talent of the professors, many of whom were doing real work and affecting change in the real world, did not disappoint, especially in the fully elective 2nd year. Further, students have much more to contribute after they have done, and have been vetted on what they have done, in the years after finishing their undergrad, rather than on what clubs they joined in their first of year of general undergrad. Undergrad Business degree != MBA.

Most of the ivies do not have undergraduate business programs, probably for this very reason. In that context the MBA makes more sense; acquire a broad quality liberal arts education as an undergraduate (electrical engineering, math, Spanish, philosophy, sociology, ...) and then supplement with the best parts of management, marketing, finance, supply chain management, IT, and accounting. The undergrad major is more a supply and demand story; students irrationally demand it so it gets supplied. Good luck getting a management position with your management undergrad degree and good luck going to graduate school with the skills you've acquired. But they sign up in droves so...

That said there are definitely skills acquired in a finance or accounting or IT program. I can't say for sure with marketing but I would suspect to a lesser degree them too. His beef seems to be primarily with a management major and I'm totally sympathetic to that point.

"Mandatory group work ... teaches kids how to assign tasks to people who aren’t capable of doing them, how to schedule wasteful meetings to re-format and explain individuals’ work, and how to make bad and inconsistent PowerPoint presentations."

So much group work I had in college started out with "keep meeting with your team". It was all just an exercise in seeing how much time we could waste in pointless meetings. Of course when I tried to delegate work, so we could actually accomplish things and waste less time in meetings, some silly girl tattle taled on me saying: "Jason doesn't want us to meet enough".

Having context to put lessons in is very important for effective academic learning (or almost any learning).

For an engineer, learning electrical theory from a text book makes a lot more sense if you have toyed around with an Arduino before.

For an undergraduate business major who may never have seen a P&L statement, let alone put one together, I can see that it would be tough to find the subject useful or engaging. This is why most MBA programs won't consider applicants until they have some industry experience. Academic learning works much better when you have a foundation to build on, and for an undergraduate studying business, it seems it would be easy to become disenfranchised without this foundation.

First, being consistently ranked beside MIT’s, UPenn’s, and Stanford’s is not the same thing as being at MIT, UPenn, or Stanford. Second, this kind of thing is much more valuable once you're older and have some perspective (hence the MBA). Business degrees are generally about operational aspects of running a business, not the startup aspects, so if you expect them to teach you how to build a run-away success you're in for a disappointment. That doesn't mean a business degree isn't valuable (in and of itself it doesn't mean it's valuable either, but at least you should know what you're getting into).

I just recently graduated from a top undergraduate b-school program. As an entrepreneur, I don't see anything that enticing about going back to get an MBA. Even if I was accepted into a top tier program. Why you ask?

Well, I am going to provide a very subjective opinion here, but would love to get some responses...

Most top ranked MBA programs cater to those who want to do one of 4 things after they graduate:

1. Become an Associate/VP in Private Equity 2. Become an Associate/VP in a Hedge Fund/Trading 3. Become an Associate in Management Consulting 4. Become a corporate executive

Now an MBA has some real benefit for those entering these fields and there is nothing wrong there. If you're an entrepreneur, I don't really see the added benefit of getting an MBA. Most of the knowledge obtained in the coursework can be learned through experience or just by picking up some literature (see "The 10-day MBA" by Steven Silbiger). From many seasoned entrepreneurs I've spoken with, an MBA limits the time you could be spending starting your business (unless you can start while in your program like Jerry Yang or Sergey/Larry)

There is an advantage through networking with other like-minded entrepreneurs in your program and using the school's resources, but it pretty much stops there.

The one exception I would make for an MBA program really benefiting the entrepreneur is hands down...Stanford.

Stanford has the proximity to the Valley and also the roster of success stories (yahoo, google, HP, Cisco, Sun) but it's real value is that it serves as an ad-hoc incubator for start-up innovation. Just take a minute and subscribe to the free podcasts from the STVP (Stanford Technology Ventures Program) on itunes and you'll get an idea of why Stanford seems to be the only program that values entrepreneurship.

If anyone can think of other MBA programs that help entrepreneurs, I would like to hear about them.

On the MBA, a few friends w/ science backgrounds said they cruised through top 10 b-schools without much effort. They did it only to transition from science to business careers quickly. Their advice was to skim an intro finance & marketing book. The rest was crap.

A school like Michigan draws from kids whose high school experience may be quite varied; as a result most intro classes are extremely slow, memorization intensive, and focus on very crude sorts of assignments and testing.

When these sorts of classes are used as admissions criteria for special programs (such as the BBA) you end up with a huge amount of competitiveness even though the material is easy.

The inevitable consequence of this is a lot of busy work, etc., so that some students eventually stand out as having done a better job at learning easy material and can be awarded the prize (admission to the BBA program, etc.).

I was shocked by the phenomenon of students ganging up on the professors to make tests "open note", and other approaches that allow less able students who are willing to use brute force approaches to thrive.

Note: In life, intelligence isn't really all that important, so the students have the right idea and so the rewards they reap for that behavior probably predict future economic rewards.

An undergraduate degree in this country teaches you how to become a worker bee. If you like being a worker bee, getting a decent(?) salary, taking 2 weeks and then later in life maybe 6 weeks vacation, by all means study business, marketing, etc. Otherwise, get educated.

"Self education is, I firmly believe, the only kid of education there is." -Isaac Asimov

If only we could have a few more people every year become free thinkers and creators.

There's an interesting book called "Managers Not MBAs", written by a professor of business, which talks about why the MBA system is pretty broken.

IMO, studying business as an undergrad is pretty useless. Study something real (science or engineering), and if you want to learn about business later, go to business school (or start a company if you really want to learn about business).

I thought I would chime in, since I think my experience is slightly unique.

I enrolled in undergrad at Boston University as a Computer Systems and Physics major. After two horrible years of all-nighters and poor grades, I came to the realization that I didn't even like the jobs I would be lined up for (this was shortly after the dot com bubble burst) or the people I was going to be working with.

So I left the major and completed my degree from tiny Ithaca College as an Integrated Marketing Communications major.

Now, after a few years in the professional world as an ad exec, I'm pursuing my MBA from Boston College.

So coming from a mix engineer/marketing background, I can say that business school as a whole plays it far too safe. They dumb down the math requirements, and they don't push the "soft skills" enough either. Our "soft skills" class was treated pretty universally as a joke, and yet I didn't leave my corporate finance class feeling any more knowledgeable in that area either.

After a recent trip to Palo Alto, I have been dreaming about the opportunities that would be in front of me if I had pursued my MBA at Stanford, instead of taking the easy way out to Boston College. But in reality, I find the true value in b-school to be from your fellow classmates, network of alumni, and time you spend actually thinking about business.

Let me elaborate a little on that last point. This is the first time in my (short) career I've been able to read articles, discuss them with professors, and spend time critiquing existing business models. While this time spent won't show up on any transcripts, I think it will be invaluable to my future prospects.

I'll cut this comment short - but I encourage all to evaluate both the student body and the network of alumni before choosing a b-school. These are easily the two strongest aspects of the education you will take away afterwards.

all the best, jeff vincent

Background : I started a business and managed to build it out with no formal education at all.

I often wonder whether formal education in business would have helped me, or hindered me.

I'm certain the structured information contained in a structured business course would have been useful.

At the same time, when I was starting out, I did a lot of things that no reasonable educational institution would advocate just to get through the month and make payday. During all of this, I was reading and learning as fast as I could about all of the numerous knowledge gaps I began to realise I had, as I came up against various walls.

After years of experience in running a business, when I read books about business/sales/marketing/economics, it's far easier to process and understand the theory.

I think any kind of education about business is valuable, but I also think it's 10 times more valuable if you have some kind of real-life experience to which you can map the theory.

I have always thought business school would be a lot better off if people were forced to read people like Seth Godin or even Chris Anderson.

My problem with business people is that they learn buzz words and jargon, and often treat the "makers" as tools. I would have a lot more respect for b-school if business majors were forced to pick a "concentration"- engineering, CS, etc. They wouldn't be expected to be great at their concentration; they just would need to know enough about what the people they're managing do.

I love this line: "For one, it’s harder to teach engineering to a marketer than it is to teach marketing to an engineer."

It's my belief that most engineers or programmers could be great marketers or business people, if they didn't have to spend all their time creating things. Business people have time on their side- they don't really have to make anything, so they can spend more time getting ahead.

I dated a finance major (in the undergrad business school) for two years when I was at Georgetown. My impression of her classes was the same - that they were training, not education, and intellectually void.

That said, she's now a successful analyst at Merrill, so she must have gotten something out of it.

I would largely agree that a business education doesn't prepare you for entrepreneurship. But it isn't exactly valueless. Here's some of the courses and concepts I liked about MY business education:

- Case studies: in accounting/biz analysis class, we learned by studying fictional and real case studies, from jewelery startups started by 2 former students to mid-sized soda manufacturing companies. You get a background about the founders, some key market factors, relevant prices and financial figures, etc. You then come up with your own conclusions and rationalize why, and present your findings under a Socratic teaching environment.

Strategy course + game simulation: The strategy game was a lot of fun, you get together with your group and try to take over the shoe business by building factories in 4 continents, setting prices, budgets, R&D, etc. It also based its currencies against real world currencies. Every week, you got your results and tried to out-compete other groups.

Operations: My ops prof worked in consulting and bragged to clients that if he couldn't find a way to save you money in 20 mins, he'd consult for free. He dives straight into the books and starts crossing out inventory. Why? Inventory takes storage space, heat, security, insurance. Ops is largely inapplicable to web startups because it deals with tangibles. But I still liked learning about it.

I would say business schools aren't really for the hacker/entrepreneur mindset. They are generally for people who want careers in management.

Ha! He makes some good points but he is way wrong about math and econ classes being better than business classes. It is the same bullshit. Professors are never right for the job they are doing especially in introductory courses designed to lay the foundation. We spend 50 minutes covering definitions and examples that can be covered in less than 20 and we spend 50 minutes because professors are lazy and the curriculum is divided into 50 minutes for no apparent reason whatsoever.

While I was reading this three separate things sprang in my mind and I think there is some degree of connection between them. Over the last decade busness degrees have become more and more popular, leaving engineering and science for nerds. Also I have seen more high school kids with an Idea that collage is waste of time and money, they better of trying to make it on their own. It seems that all these business schools which crunch out PHBs have given bad reputation to a collage degree.

Currently a MBA student at Stanford Graduate School of Business, I'm also bootstrapping a startup with two CS graduate students and a seasoned designer. As an entrepreneur, I can definitely speak for the benefits that Stanford GSB provides: (1) The Stanford and Stanford GSB networks are both phenomenal. Alumni are very accessible and connected with the school. Classmates are highly collaborative and bring contacts from almost every industry you can think of and want to learn about. To start a business, access to relevant networks is critical and GSB provides that. (2) Entrepreneurship classes taught by experienced industry veterans. Some of my favorite classes are taught by serial entrepreneurs, famous venture capitalists, or legendary executives including Eric Schmidt, Andy Grove, Mark Leslie, Andy Rachleff, Audrey MacLean, Mike Lyons, Joe Peterson, and Harold Irving Grousbeck, among many others. (3) The roster of speakers that come to speak both at GSB and other parts of Stanford is extremely useful for entrepreneurs. Classes and clubs invite speakers including Ron Conway, Peter Thiel, Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter), Shawn Fanning (founder of Napster), Chad Hurley (founder of Youtube), Aaron Patzer (founder of Mint.com), Mark Pincus (founder of Zynga), and many others. STVP (stvp.stanford.edu) and ETL (etl.stanford.edu) are two other great resources. As a student, you can even take the initiative as a club leader to approach some of the most successful people in the valley to come speak. (4) Stanford GSB has a Center for Entrepreneurial Studies which organizes seasoned entrepreneurs, angels and venture investors to hold 1:1 free advisory sessions with entrepreneurial students to discuss their startup ideas and help students build the network. I've personally found them very valuable. (5) Many successful alumni who are entrepreneurs, active angels, or venture investors often hold intimate networking events, such as as small group dinners, to meet with entrepreneurial students. It's another way to network and receive feedback on your startup idea! (6) The school also offers classes in which students across business school, engineering school and other schools can work in a team on a startup idea together. Some of these class projects continued as startups after the class.

Overall, the best value is the access to investor, entrepreneur and industry networks, the ability to meet other entrepreneurial students, and to receive advice from some of the best entrepreneurs in the industry.

The stuff you learn in business is more supplemental material for the stuff you learn in the more hard sciences like engineering. You may have built the best product, but without marketing, accounting, and operations, the product still might not succeed in the market.

With that said, I think business school courses should be taken on the side to the primary engineering courses as that provides the most well rounded education.

Do programmers/engineers have an inferiority complex vs. Management/MBA types? I don't see many articles on HN bashing sales professions advising youngsters not to go to trade school . . .

Polymorphic business/management = bad idea that has aged even worse.