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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

"Instead of students studying Literature, Art, History, and Science they would be going through the motions of a scholar while occupying their minds with things that formerly had been learned at a desk as an apprentice in a dreary Victorian counting house."

Wow, that may be the best description of the concerns of the MBA I've ever read.

I have my MBA and, to this day, I still don't know how I feel about it. Sure, it covered a lot of valuable theory and it's opened doors, but then again I often wonder if the time would have been better spent in industry, honing my skills in the trenches.

The #1 quote I remember from one of my professors, "A degree in business is a degree in nothing."

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Sure. I think it's accepted that you go to business school to network with students with rich parents. A friend of mine applying said that if she didn't get into any of the top 5 programs, it wasn't worth going.

Friend of mine went to one that's around #25. His offer coming out was $35K more than the job he left to attend the program full time. And he moved fields from one he didn't like (healthcare) to one he did (marketing). No rich parents involved. Sample size of 1 FTW!

Is that really a win though? Your friend is out two years worth of income + considerable debt to make an extra 35K after two years.

35k a year adds up pretty quickly. Salary acceleration is also likely to be increased.

I agree, especially with the first point. Also, though the program was a lot of work, two years of being back in a college environment is pretty cool for most people (from the people I've met in this program, it's not like the typical ennui- and angst-ridden experience you usually see other types of graduate school portrayed as -- although I guess it would be if you're going into it because you've got no other ideas, i.e. grad school as "the snooze button on the alarm clock of life")

That's only harvard, but harvard is still the center of a lot of business research. Of course, the vast majority of people getting MBAs from top-tier schools got in through hard work throughout their lives.

That's not really true tho'. Typical career path is prep school -> Ivy league -> investment bank/management consulting -> MBA. Their careers are the result of who their parents knew when they were 5 years old...

Actually, that's really not true. At Harvard, for example, more than a 1/3rd of the students are international, only about 1/3rd come from PE / VC / IB, students come from almost 300 different undergrad schools, and there are people in every class who are first generation immigrants, first in their family to go to college, etc.

It seems business is very applicable in the real world, making relationships, making the most of them. Why do more academic courses like Economics or Political Science have such a better reputation?

I have to agree. Even though I don't like to admit it, maybe my time in higher education would have been better spent studying a business related subject. If you're passionate enough about CS/hacking, there's so much info available online these days, you'll learn just as much by immersing yourself in the hacker communities in your own time as you would have studying for a degree.

This is a good question. Personally, it seems to me that degrees in business are of a different kind than more academic courses, but not lesser.

This difference in kind may explain some of the attitudes that are out there though. MBA's are relatively new in terms of degrees and they are much more applied than most degrees. This is simply different from what other students are working on and people tend to be disdainful of what is different, especially if it is also new. This is just an off the cuff thought, but it seems to fit.

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