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.