Hacker News Reader

Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

After working with so many MBAs from prestigious schools I find it very hard to take this kind of title at face value, before seeing the person in action. Most had an MBA at 23 years old, basically jumping straight from university classes to MBA classes with nothing in between. At best the MBA did not bring anything. At worst it made some feel so entitled that they actually performed far worse. I fail to see the added value in this and most of them failed to show it.

Given that this was happening in very large companies and involved studies in prestigious schools but nothing practical to show for it, in the end I can only assume many of these are just CV fluff.

View on HN

CV fluff is the important bit.

I'm willing to bet most MBA students directly from undergrad with no work experience between are only getting an MBA either because:

1) they couldn't get a good high paying job right out of college.

and/or 2) they read that an MBA is a good investment, and MBA students on average make $X more per year (without doing their MBA calculations and doing the time discount and opportunity cost to figure out it's propbably not worth it).

Well, as to #2, if you get an MBA right out of college it's theoretically more likely to be worth it, simply because the multiplier effect has more years to work with

Actually, it was the first exercise we did in my EMBA finance class :D

Even with an EMBA, which happens later in a career, the NPV is quite positive.

Did you use a bell curve to figure out if it's worth it -- on average -- or did you use a madelbrot curve? Unless you go to an elite school, and the tuition is cheaper than anywhere I'm aware of, you're either 1) banking on being on the good side of the curve, 2) imagining there's a gaussian distribution to salaries (which there isn't), 3) enrolled somewhere very elite or incredibly cheap, or 4) vastly underestimating how much you could be earning presently -- which if you got enrolled in an elite school, you probably could've gotten an elite job...

Nothing that fancy, we just looked at the average case using a conservative estimate of salary increase after an MBA (something like + 30% 3 years after, so way below what the FT figures show for instance), and a conservative starting salary.

Note that this was an executive MBA, so the base assumptions are a little different; in particular, attendees have a pretty good idea of what they're worth on the market and the effect of the EMBA is pretty well quantified: most EMBA participants change jobs/companies after the program, usually with a nice salary bump (although of course signing up for an EMBA in the first place is a good indication that you're willing to invest in your career, so at least part of that progress would have happened in some way or another even without the EMBA).

In my personal case, the salary increase is close to 100% 5 years after enrollment - so the investment was well worth it.

To answer the rest of your questions, the program was in the FT top 10 (now at #12 or so) and tuition was around 50k€. Yay for European business schools :D

Not if the multiplier is lower. You assume the value of the degree is the same when earned without work experience to relate to what you're learning, or that you will be able to build the same network. Not to mention you are less likely to be accepted into as good of a program without work experience.

Most of the top ranked MBA programs require 3-5 years of work experience to get in. I think it’s Harvard that allows a very small subset to go directly from undergrad.

I know people who've done a 2+2 program at Harvard, where they're admitted after undergrad but have to work for two years before being admitted. I guess it's possible to go straight to an MBA, but I don't see why it's desirable for most people. Most MBA students see it more as a credential and networking opportunity.

Doesn't this work like an assembly line now?

I'm under the impression that a lot of schools hire students like this, and then there are employers like Bain and Cisco that are lined up to hire them for two years and then hand then back over to the progran.

They come knowing certain things that most non biz grads have no clue about. Try getting technical people to do sales or PR or admin work. Of course some are unfit but try hiring 200 people by next quarter to expand sales or launch a new product without MBAs and watch the madness unfold.

The question isn't "biz" or "technical", it's "biz" or "biz plus MBA". That last bit brings no value to a person straight out of university and there's a good chance that by the time they have a chance to use that knowledge it's already lost.

The article is not saying orgs have reduced hiring MBAs is it? That would be a sign of not having value. It's saying people are not applying because they have better opportunities and don't want to deal with immigration headaches.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com