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Comment by zwayhowder | Hacker News Reader

I am just about halfway through an MBA program at an Australian University. On average most of my essay assignments are 2000 words +-10%. I was writing 2000 word essays in high school 20 years ago, this is not what I expected at all.

Having said that I didn't do an undergraduate degree, and really want that piece of paper so I can open some new doors.

So many of the other students in my group work shouldn't be passing high school classes let along a postgraduate degree from a "world class" university.

One thing I want to make clear is this is not xenophobia, I speak (a little) Mandarin, Korean & Japanese. I love working in multicultural teams. I don't care where you are from or how hard it is to speak English any more than people in China, Korea & Japan care how badly I mangle their languages. I care if you don't try, don't practice and play the racism card when a lecturer fails you because you clearly don't understand the premise of the subject.

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By passing out a bunch of degrees to unqualified students a school is essentially printing a currency that will eventually be recognized as worthless. One could see this as a tragedy of the commons for everyone but the highest tier schools.

This here is precisely the problem, and is also precisely why these types of students aren't mere "cash cows"; they're existential threats to engineering management's ability to hire people who can actually do what they claim to be able to do.

(And to engineers' ability to make to employers strong and credible claims about what they can do.)

I don't think so. If this is so widely-known then there will be some bias in selection of people for an interview. And after a phone screen it will be obvious if the candidate knows anything.

This seems good for me personally, I decided not to go to school and am about to start working in software for a Fortune 500 company. If degrees are seen as worthless, and other heuristics are used (such as the technical interview I participated in), I will have a good chance of being hireable in the future.

This was me for the last 20 years. Eventually my interests changed and I reached a point when I knew I needed to learn some things that for me an on campus MBA is the best way to learn.

Good for you, no good for people who wanted to take a structured+exhaustive approach to learning CS.

How did you get into an MBA program without an undergraduate degree?

If you have a lot of professional experience and high marks on the GMAT you’ll be able to get into a surprising number of MBA programs at prestigious universities. I’m sure networking also helps.

There are plenty of MBA programs in the UK that don't require an undergraduate degree. A person in my family got onto one with no real 'high school' level qualifications even! He struggled and dropped out. What they really want from you is fees.

Australian universities recognise prior work experience for a MBA. If you've working been in a business related field (virtually most office jobs) and have some aptitude there's a good chance of getting admitted.

Sorry for the delay, accidentally set my anti-procrastination timeout to 5 hours.

I articulated through a Graduate Certificate program that encompassed 4 of the compulsory subjects for the 16 subject MBA. I had to obtain a credit average to move into the MBA itself.

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