Elite MBAs are no Longer Relevant

> As someone who has spent a substantial amount of time reviewing top MBA programs

As someone who has spent a substantial amount of time with friends who graduated from Stanford GSB, I can tell you, an elite MBA may not guarantee anything but it opens many, many doors for you (it's up to you to also close it once you're in the door). I'm talking about regular lunches with VC's and billionaires, getting a soft landing when your startup fails, and leading big teams at FAANG's a couple years after graduation.

That's just the perks you get in Silicon Valley. Wall Street is another level entirely. They only hire elite MBAs. A great book to read on this is Liquidated by Karen Ho, which details the many privileges elite graduates get on Wall Street.

> They only hire elite MBAs.

Can you clarify? In my experience in finance this has not been true for at least the past decade.

Blackrock, JPMC, and many hedge funds hire out of good schools but solely Ivy League or elite MBAs.

And certainly the director level has plenty of state school graduates.

Am I missing something?

> The 'network' of an elite MBA is diminished with democratized access to capital and executives (I.e. LinkedIn, Hunter/Snov.io, and Crunchbase)

This is breathtakingly naïve.

Yeah seriously, LinkedIn? I can only deeply scoff at that lol

Yeah I’m not sure how direct in person access to decision makers through an MBA, is comparable to those websites that largely are just tools to look people up.

Your chances of success are orders of magnitude higher from in person networking through a top program, vs cold-emailing someone you found on linkedin. That’s just the reality of it.

The last time I heard this argument the person thought the difficult part was getting the literal contact info. The value of the network in their view was ease of getting the phone numbers.

And even if you can get in touch and they reply, there is getting in touch as a cold outsider and getting in touch as someone you have mutual friends with.

When I formed and ran my FinTech startup, I regularly got meetings with CEOs and CFOs of unicorns all from cold emails using these tools. I'm also 1 - 2 calls away from the types of people referred to in this thread, and then some, using these methods and nurturing relationships. It all depends on the value proposition and what you have done.

It is. It is like saying that access to Stack Overflow diminishes and undermines status of elite software developers.

The reality is a lot of people do not know how to use the "democratized access" they get.

Being able to log in and send anybody a message is far, far from being able to make meaningful connections with real people.

In an ideal world you're right. However, points 4 & 5 are the limiting factors.

The reason why elite MBAs make sure to ensure the success of each other is to make sure they're also given the leg up when looking for opportunities.

If a Oxbridge MBA judges a compatriot solely on merits and doesn't extend an opportunity then it cheapens their own value.

Perpetuating the privilege is the point. It's the only reason why I would do an MBA - for the blatant, proud and culturally accepted nepotistic advantage.

> Perpetuating the privilege is the point.

Agreed.

And it's not just MBA programs either. People hire who they're familiar with, and who's in their general proximity. SV companies hire heavily from elite California based scools, because often that's where the founders and other top execs went.

London startups are the same. Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial grads, everywhere.

Few years ago, when I was more in the scene, I met one of these guys and he told me he was pitching "Uber for Umbrellas" to VCs. Then I got into antler... Let's just say I've become cynical.

Umbrellas.. like umbrella companies?

Perpetuating privilege is now the #1 reason I will avoid these people in the future.

This cuts both ways. When you have equal candidates and one has an elite MBA, you can safely assume the MBA got there because of more nepotism and the non-MBA is the more valuable pick.

==you can safely assume the MBA got there because of more nepotism and the non-MBA is the more valuable pick.==

Based on what? Cynicism?

This is a theme in Taleb's work. He would say that only suckers choose the MBA in this hypothetical, since the MBA (and their network) is optimizing for projecting an image of competence, whereas the non-MBA actually had to have competence to get where they are. https://medium.com/incerto/surgeons-should-notlook-like-surg...

Interesting argument

It feels like flipping the initial assumption upside down in order to make a new assumption that's just as wrong, but in the opposite direction.

They should be judged on how they perform in the job interview.

I misspoke. You shouldn't "safely assume." What I mean is that all-else-equal, it's some extra information to go on for a candidate. That they might have gotten an extra boost from nepotism to their current position equivalent to the other person, and that if you had to pick between candidates, the MBA had an X% chance of not quite being as good as the other.

Yes, it's somewhat like "flipping the initial assumption upside down", but really it's just accounting for there being the opposite boost in the first place.

Candidates aren't solely judged on interview performance. Again, if things are extremely close, you'll have to include other data like career or education history to make the most informed choice.

I don't know. I have several friends who went to Harvard Business School and it seems like a degree from HBS or equivalent is a requirement to get into certain fields. It's hard to get into private equity for example. I'm sure someone will reply and say "I ran a lemonade stand, now work at a top PE firm." But top schools are a core feeder. Likewise into consulting -- hard to get a job at Bain or BCG without a degree from HBS.

I work in banking. I dated a woman with a global MBA from a name brand university. In both scenarios, you dismiss the value of a blue chip MBA at your peril. A lower tier MBA from a regular school? Might be a different story.

If you want to know how successful an MBA program is, look at how many people the school employs to raise donations from alumni. The bigger the alumni fundraising team, the bigger the pockets of their graduates.

I'm not from the US, so I never got it - why do people donate to schools they got degree from? The degree wasn't free (usually very far from it), they weren't done a favor that they now need to repay. Anyone care to enlighten me? Do the donations open doors to some elite alumni club?

At most private schools donations are a way to ensure your children have a better chance of getting into the same school. Legacy students at Harvard for example have about 33% chance of being admitted vs the overall acceptance rate of 4.6%.

Ah! Also not from the US... now that makes sense!

But from your numbers, what's the split in child acceptance rate between "former student" vs "former student who donates"?

And now I'm even more curious, what's an average rough donation amount to hold onto this "reserved spot"?

Even more than that - want to evaluate two MBA programs? See where the students landed for internships and full time roles.

That’s where you see the difference. Not necessarily “better”, but certain schools will get you into certain roles.

Bain is way too big to only take HBS. I went to michigan and they were hiring 50+ undergrads a year. The MBA grads seemed to mostly be going into consulting with Bain one of the main recruiters. Maybe you won't make partner unless you have the Harvard MBA though.

Nahh… the MBA gets your foot in the door. Believe it or not, actual ability determines your career path after that.

There are plenty of Ivey league MBAs who never get very high on the ladder. Plenty.

"Management consultants are no longer relevant". But seriously, I encountered MCs at an old-school Fortune-100 recently, and they seemed painfully incompetent at anything software and machine learning related. I had many meetings hashing out strategies related to recommendations and search, and I still scratch my head wondering what came of all their efforts. Maybe they are more relevant in less technical areas?

All of the consulting gigs my friends do are in non-software.

Sure, but only a fraction of those with an MBA go into said fields and I would argue an internal corporate rigorous training program for high potential leaders would be more suitable.

There are two different threads to this argument to tease apart:

1. MBAs are useless, and should be ignored

2. MBAs are useless, and are ignored

On the first point, I don't think MBAs are useless, and in many fields, as the field becomes technical, the MBA becomes more useful. Marketing is more technical, operations are more technical, finance is more technical, and the MBA provides a sort of intro like getting a general medical degree before specializing.

It is true that a candidate should be judged on their merits and a non-credentialed candidate in any field may be superior to a credentialed candidate. That is a more general point about credentials. The counter-point is, how do you find such a candidate? If I interviewed 5000 people, perhaps the best one would not have a particular credential, but if being human I can only interview 20 then my chances of finding a good candidate are higher if I focus on the 100 or so credentialed candidates in the batch. In short, the credential provides some signal.

Finally, even if were useless, it doesn't appear that they are being ignored. Hiring is still strong, and salaries are only going up.

Never thought of an MBA as technical, that is an interesting perspective to think about.

I think (5) is the weakest point, and also the major reason for getting an MBA.

With respect to the other points:

(1) Most '20 year old aspiring tech founders' can hardly be thought of as either a specialist nor experienced, but that doesn't make it any less a valuable experience.

(2) Hiring is an extremely difficult process, and most startups can take risks on experience and tangible contributions primarily because they can fire more easily (and the applicant pool is self-selecting) when it doesn't work out. At a large company signals are proportionally more important because you can't rely on interviewers, etc. to have high accuracy in judging candidates (I recognize this should be improved, but it's not currently).

(3) This is generalizable to all schooling except for e.g. chemistry labs or other things requiring expensive equipment and not specifically to MBAs.

(4) I would argue that more African-Americans have demonstrated "leadership qualities" and "emotional IQ in social settings" than have excelled at algorithms, and their representation as VPs or SVPs of a generic corporate function is higher than their representation as quants.

Purely anecdotal but folks I know who paused careers or did part-time programs to get MBAs ended up with the same jobs as before. One in particular went to a top 3 program and explicitly regretted it because his peer ended up being promoted to an executive level just by staying in their job those two years.

Generally accepted logic is that visible payoffs are not immediate but several years down the line for more senior roles. Ex. when someone is looking for a VP/Director/C-Suite role, the network and resume line items are more valuable. Most people will go back to similarly leveled roles, potentially in a different industry (like engineering -> finance/consulting).

As a corollary to my anecdotal data, I'm not sure I've ever met an exec who had an MBA and I've never even thought of putting it on a job description for any kind of leadership role. Except maybe a CFO type position.

Part time executive MBA programs are often a better option for people in that situation.

It may shock people but an MBA is not a substitute for competence.

An MBA can be a massive leg up in certain circumstances. In other it’s a box you need to check.

I think this sounds very idealistic, but you have no direct evidence. It would be nice if an Elite MBA didn't do anything for you, but these points sound like they are more against MBAs in general. I am anti-elitist, but the reality is that a Harvard MBA probably gets you an interview at most every company at most positions, and if you look at the boards / c suites in companies they do overwhelmingly come from elite MBA programs.

I’ve been reading articles like this proclaiming the imminent death/irrelevance of the MBA for decades now. Tech audiences seem to receive them well.

Never come across less than positive content about MBAs from anyone who holds one though.

Sure, they just spent $150k, and they want to get a ROI for themselves and their friends from the program.

oh hmmm then why are so many PMs at FAANG from GSB/Booth/HBS/Wharton/Kellog etc? seems maybe you're just wishfully thinking

I did a quick LinkedIn search for PMs at Facebook. Only one PM out of the 7 I looked at had an MBA from a top 25, only 2 had MBAs at all, and both achieved those while already working as a PM in the FAANG realm.

Managers and especially managers of managers+ are far more likely to have an MBA in my experience, but again that is heavily biased toward people who got that credential after or more likely while working in big tech.

Now my sample is biased toward former SWEs and the Pacific Northwest, but I think an MBA is more a career accelerator along the people management track inside a company then necessary for product management or an enabler for people to enter the FAANG realm.

LinkedIn doesn't show you everyone you want to see. Anecdotally there are several internal groups at FB (for example) that are variations on "Booth at FB" and are populated by almost exclusively PMs. All told it's hundreds.

Everybody wanted those PM jobs at FAANG when my wife was doing her MBA, those were the best "I don't want to work 20 hour days" alternatives to big 3 consulting.

Anectdotal, but we recently had our elite MBA product manager 'de-hired' due to ineffectiveness. Just because someone can take all the necessary tests in their formative years does not mean they can navigate complex systems in their career.

But that’s true in any situation. Doctor, dentist, lawyer, engineer or scientist. Just because you can jump through the hoops doesn’t mean you’re competent.

ive thought a lot about this recently and my opinion is its far less about the type of degree (ex: MBA, MS, MSF, etc.) and all about the brand name of the school.

in the past on several occasions ive seen hiring managers open to interviewing candidates with no relevant experience but simply because of the brand name. the brand name elicits a signal of quality that is hard to ignore (consciously or subconsciously) - that may change in the future but to this point my personal opinion is going to harvard, mit, yale, princeton, columbia, etc. is absolutely an advantage in getting "noticed".

imo paying out of pocket for an MBA from a mid tier or lower school is increasingly less useful, bordering on being completely neutral in terms of benefit while having substantial opportunity cost. certain scenarios (employer paid, necessary to break through glass ceiling, etc) can certainly change that calculus.

my personal experience (undergrad from a mid tier expensive private university in a large city, MBA from a state school) is that almost no one has cared about me having an MBA to this point, and the brand names of either school are nowhere near strong enough to get noticed. my MBA was a very unique program and I feel was very enriching but unfortunately others can't see that in a quick glance.

if I had to do it over again i would attempt to get a stronger brand name somewhere in my resume - whether undergraduate or graduate. in fact im considering further graduate study for that exact reason.

I have a similar background, but I am perhaps later in my career. In the early days after my MBA graduation, I would have agreed - nobody seemed to care about the degree and I wondered if it was worthwhile. As my career progressed I found that it did matter, people just didn't mention it. I know for a fact that the credential was a deciding factor a couple times in my career when the competition for a role was tight.

>The 'network' of an elite MBA is diminished with democratized access to capital and executives (I.e. LinkedIn, Hunter/Snov.io, and Crunchbase)

This is a hypothesis, not a fact that can be offered in support of the argument. And I doubt the validity of the hypothesis. Being connected on LinkedIn to someone you met at a conference somewhere once does not confer the same trust as going through college with them.

I made a lot of lifelong friends when my wife went to Kellogg, and drank a lot of beer. Wouldn't replace that experience with anything, but I guess I didn't actually have to attend class or anything.

I just wouldn't discount the experience at an M7. Though I guess a startling number of those friends do seem to generally either regret or are overall neutral on the experience, given the cost.

Relative network effects are what an MBA is for.

The actual education is over generalized to make it easy for Lord Fontleroy, who is to have a degree to insulate them from work (no joke the degree system started as a payola scheme to provide secular credentials to rich kids the rubes would be too dumb to invalidate, as belief in the churches central authority fell apart).

A few things in response to this.

1) I find it pretty damning of whatever jobs this poster is referring to. Are they so boring and singularly focused that having a broad education is a waste of time? Do they have say in any important decisions that cross disciplines? It's like when people say that a computer science or any higher education is unneeded to be a developer. It's true for a certain set of jobs, but those positions always seem very boring to me anyway.

2) The difference between education and Education. Higher education is not job training. It's not a YouTube tutorial. You are learning ways of thinking and analyzing, over the course of a few years with the direct help of paid teachers. When you have great teachers, anything is possible. If you think that any month long MOOC, tips-and-tricks blog post, or conference talk will have that effect on your brain, you're mistaken.

The primary benefits of an Elite MBA program is two fold -

1. Network with the rich kids and who is who.

2. Mindset - minimum acceptable job title might be something you and me might aspire to achieve by the time we retire.

These two might get you to 90%, the other 10% is doing the right thing at the right time.

ps: I can neither afford nor put up with the grind of an MBA.

I disagree.

MBA is a way of getting some specific type of knowledge.

For a determined person they can do it on their own, the information is and has always been accessible (if you care to read books).

I think what changed is a perception of MBA. Particularly due to outrageous successes of some people without MBAs.

MBA wasn't the right choice for me, but it worked out great for a sibling.

Having top companies come to campus to recruit new hires is a level of connection that is simply not available elsewhere for the vast majority of people. HN is seemingly full of people needing to beat back LinkedIn recruiters with a stick, but that is not a typical situation for a mid-career professional.

For me, I just couldn't stomach the idea of six-figure debt and making no money (summer internship aside) for 2 years. That would weigh on my mind too much, and likely affect my performance and enjoyment of the program.

I like to say that an MBA are the things you learn along the way about business -- and those things are most efficient to learn "on the job" with a good mentor and some reading -- not in academia.

Very good 5 points with proviso that elite MBA not 'worth it' for everyone, but rather than its relevancy is/has been declining and will continue to be negatively correlated with technological advancement. Cheers.....Steve AI startup advisor 'force multiplier' aka 'The Merchant of Light' https://www.forcemultipliersteveardire.com

I am curious to hear from any programmer types here have done one of these elite MBAs. If so, what was your experience like? How difficult were they? This [1] is the only real-life experience in-thread I have seen so far, but that's from the spouse of a student.

--------------------

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799646

A lot of people on this thread are saying that the elite MBA is still very relevant because of 4 and 5. Sure.

But perhaps a more interesting question is, if those are the real goals, is an MBA the most effective and direct way to deliver them? If no one seems to be arguing that their value is what happens in the actual classes, why should gate-keeping and network-creation happen through a degree program?

In my previous job we made software for basically all the top MBA schools. I had a lot of talks with their program directors and they all made it clear that what they're selling is not an education but it is an experience and a networking opportunity. They made no secret of that whatsoever. So yeah, if you treat it like a networking opportunity you might still get value from it.

Can you provide some evidence for your theory? For example, compare the ratio of compensation for MBAs to experienced non-MBAs over time. Over the timespan of your theory, does the MBA premium % decrease, increase, or stay the same?

(Pay isn’t always a great proxy for relevance, but it is for MBAs and employers.)

This is historical data based on the current environment, the argument is that within the next 10 - 20 years, it will grow to become irrelevant.

How much of this is just sour grapes?

These sorts of posts are much more convincing when the OP has an admissions letter in hand.

Anecdotal but 2 out of 3 friends that have taken some sort of programming instruction in the last year have had masters degrees that have been useless to their career (one in teaching, one in business at NYU).

So sour grapes might be on the side of the degree holder at realizing some of the OP is partially true.

I disagree with your Point #5.

Even if you and I become friends through the Internet, you may not know enough to trust my other friends, or recursively trust my friends' friends. The Internet gives us "the strength of weak ties" but building dense networks is still an unsolved problem.

Alumni of elite MBA programs build VERY LARGE networks of trust. They trust other alumni that they have never met much more than you and I would trust a stranger. And they maintain their networks over years--sharing job openings, asking for back-channel reference checks of mutual friends, etc. These networks are a massive advantage if you want to be--for example--a venture capitalist.

There are other ways to build that kind of network without spending money. You could join a hypergrowth company like Facebook or Airbnb. You could join the military. Alumni from Israel's Unit 8200 have founded so many companies, the unit may as well be a business school.

But it is a mistake to deny that dense elite networks exist, or to believe that solely connecting with strangers on the Internet is a sufficient replacement.

From my perspective, as well as that of a good friend who obtained an MBA from Pepperdine, MBA's are most useful if they come with two things: A non-trivial amount of work in the domain of interest and, preferably, a degree in a related discipline.

In his case he had a Physics degree from Oxford and worked in various industries for 20+ years before entering the MBA program. We'd have lunch a few times a month. He would, almost always, lead the conversation with "You are not going to believe the nonsense...".

Not to say that the education was worthless, quite to the contrary. What he found was that students who were on the academic train and never stopped to work in the real world came to the program almost completely devoid of context and perspective. He was fond of saying an MBA was useless without real-world experience and was glad it took him so long to get to entering this program.

What is an "elite MBA"?

How does it differ from an "MBA"?

Why, oh why, do all the posts so far refer to "elite MBA" instead of the normal English "MBA"?

I always say this as a joke "I don't do MBA. I hire MBAs".

>The hiring of an elite MBA over (2) encourages an elitism that disadvantages minorities and hinders social equality that socially aware tech companies seek to combat.

This is a feature of the system, not a bug. Elite MBA's serve as a class signifier, and not much more.

MBAs are worthless vs MBAs are overvalued and overproduced.

I knew an older, highly successful CXO type who had changed careers from developer into management and gone to a low-tier MBA school in the process who had a hilarious line: "I've worked with a ton of Harvard MBAs, I had to fire every one of them."

Your point about career shift is really where the MBA shines. MBAs should be viewed as a tool for those who are moving out of a direct technical field into management, and MBA students should bring some real world context with them to their classwork.

The problem with the so-called elite MBA schools is they are designed not for people with experience, but recruit those right out of undergrad with 0 business experience. This results in a general graduate population with highly inflated sense of confidence and no actual work to back it up, a very dangerous combination.

I've never seen or heard of a technical manager with an MBA... I've seen plenty of technical people, with an aptitude for it, move into management and pick up the ropes, so I'm skeptical that an MBA provides anything but a neutral or even negative signal in these situations.

> The problem with the so-called elite MBA schools is they are designed not for people with experience, but recruit those right out of undergrad with 0 business experience

I have no interest in an mba, but I was under the impression most elite programs expected significant work experience. At Harvard the 2023 has an average of 5 years work experience. https://www.hbs.edu/mba/admissions/class-profile/Pages/defau...