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Comment by l2silver | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions MBAs graduating from top schools not being able to find a job in a tough job market, but obviously this problem is as old as time for MBA graduating any given year. One of the issues is that the MBA is a money maker for these universities, so why not graduate as many people as possible.

The other issue is what people expect from these MBA programs. They see it as a way to get career flexibility, but in reality an MBA really opens up two spaces: Consulting, and becoming an executive in the field you're already poised to become an executive in.

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I recall the reverse problem when I was leaving school smack in the dot com era.

We had one friend who today would probably fall loosely under the moniker of Edge Lord. He was always stirring shit, and we also always suspected that his mouth was writing checks his skills couldn't cash. Most of us were working on little personal projects. Which is essentially what you do at that school - the teachers are almost world class, but the computer labs were undersubscribed, and maybe twenty hours out of the month was there a wait for hardware. You could almost always justify using a machine to work on 'frivolities'. So we all did. Games, Unix tools, whatever. But he never did.

Come graduation time, all of my friends were scattering to the west coast, Chicago, NYC, for their new jobs, meanwhile he elected to enroll for a masters degree instead. In the middle of a gold rush. Somehow never believed that higher education was his main priority.

> so why not graduate as many people as possible

surely there is a limit to this, unless people don't care about metrics like median graduate salary?

> One of the issues is that the MBA is a money maker for these universities, so why not graduate as many people as possible.

I wonder why U.S. universities issuing MBA degrees take a "graduate as many as possible" approach, whereas medical schools use a "intentionally limit the supply of doctors" approach. Perhaps it's a game theory thing. Any one school can easily and independently increase the number of MBAs it graduates, and so they all do despite wanting there to be fewer graduates overall, but it's harder for any one medical school to independently decide to create more doctors on its own.

You can not be doctor without degree. But you can certainly do same MBAs job without MBA. And then the whole doctor pipeline is much more interconnected and larger process. Simply giving out medical degree and dumping them out of the door doesn't work. Hospitals and residencies need to be involved.

Law schools might be better comparison. The number of lawyers graduated is not limited...

Medical schools are limited by residency spots. Theyd love to expand, but without more federal subsidies for residencies it cant happen.

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