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Comment by code4tee | Hacker News Reader

The MBA has lost its once held stature in most industries. It’s almost become an acronym for dumb business decisions in many circles: “This must be something the MBAs came up with.”

If schools want to stay relevant they need to create programs that produce leadership candidates for today’s modern business environment. For too long it’s just been a cash cow for schools and people went because it was the thing to do. With market attitudes changing and applications way down schools need to rethink.

Dare I say an MBA case study is needed on making the MBA relevant again ;-)

Yes the networking element is there but seriously you don’t need to pay 50+k a year to do networking!

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There is a case study, on CEO with or w/o an MBA, and there was no correlation into the company performance, there was a positive correlation with better compensation.

We’ll post the link when I find it.

Edit: just use google scholar, there are a load of studies. Scanning through the titles quickly shows that a many people are wondering what is the value of the MBA. It does make the schools a lot of money.

Well, isn't that just like evaluating the difference between whether or not you're a self-taught programmer?

If you already have business skills, either from an undergraduate business degree, experience, or self-teaching, you don't need a non-specialized MBA.

If you look at the actual MBA curriculum it has courses that seem to be quite obviously useful if you ask me.

The only problem here is that there are some places that won't let you take a management role without a masters degree or MBA, instead of evaluating your actual level of skill, creating a surplus of MBA demand.

(And there are bad engineering schools just like there are bad MBA schools).

>Well, isn't that just like evaluating the difference between whether or not you're a self-taught programmer?

Not quite. Self-taught programmers can get high salaries too. Notice what the OP said about how having a MBA did not correlate with company performance, however it DID correlate with increased compensation. Basically, if you want to get paid extremely well, you need the MBA, even if it has nothing to do with how the company performs.

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