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Comment by leroy_masochist | Hacker News Reader

Fellow top MBA grad here. Strongly agree with the points above, and I'd add:

4) The Recruiting Pipeline: There is a tranche of very desirable jobs out there that are, de facto, restricted to graduates of the top-N (3 or 7 or whatever) MBA programs. Specifically, associate-level roles at consulting firms, i-banks, and management rotational programs at F500 CPG/industrials/FANG. Especially if you're a career changer (I was a military officer pre-MBA), the 2 years of opportunity-cost are often worth the opportunity set provided by the recruiting platform.

With that said, it's important to note that there's no secret MBA knowledge you'll get at any of these programs, nor will you be coated with magical MBA dust that makes life a cakewalk once you graduate.

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> de facto, restricted to graduates of the top-N (3 or 7 or whatever) MBA programs.

Isn't this a problem?

A problem for who?

Certainly not for the MBA programs and their graduates.

Inverting your response gives the answer: anyone for whom those programmes are not attainable, or from which they're excluded.

Right- the current state of affairs serves the top-tier MBA programs, their graduates, and management consulting/ banking/ PE firms very well for the time being.

Top-tier MBA progams' whole pitch is about how getting in to these elite institutions confers massive benefits to the rest of your career- they certainly have no incentive to change any of this. The employing firms get a veneer of shiny "elite" frosting over their staffs (and they're mostly selling the abilities of their staffs)- the current systems serves them very well too. Being egalitarian would have some feel-good optics (maybe), but isn't in the interest of any of these entities.

These old-school institutions aren't where you go if you want something that reflects Silicon Valley-esque "meritocracy", where credentials don't matter and only impact does. That's why this ethos is a big deal, and different than what came before (though it has its own set of issues).

"Meritocracy" itself is a fraught concept:

Although the concept of meritocracy has existed for centuries, the term itself was coined in 1958 by the sociologist Michael Dunlop Young in his satirical essay The Rise of the Meritocracy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy

Ya I'm with you, hence the scare quotes.

In any case, I'm not defending the MBA industrial complex, but it is an attractive, valuable, and stable system they've set up. I definitely got value from it, but fair it is not.

Silicon Valley/ VC-land has a seemingly more egalitarian system on the surface, but if you dig even an inch deep there's a lot of ugly stuff there too.

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