I was a professor in one of the better MBA programs.
(1) Students. The students were good, both when
they entered and when they left.
(2) Courses.
Accounting. Except for students who already knew
accounting, the accounting courses likely helped all
the students who wanted to be in business. But the
undergraduate accounting courses did, also.
Likely if wanted to sit for the CPA exam, then would
need more study. My undergraduate school had
nothing on business, but if a student wanted a CPA
then there was a nice woman in town who gave
tutoring, had the study materials, etc. One student
worked with this woman in the summer after her
Bachelor's, took the CPA exam, and made the highest
score in the state. So, if want to sit for the CPA
exam, then just do the studying and take the exam,
whether have had a business school course in
accounting or not. Qualification: That CPA example
was from over 10 years ago; the CPA exams may have
changed a lot since then. If want a CPA, then
should look carefully into the CPA exam process.
Statistics. There was a course in statistics, but I
was not impressed with it. The students didn't
learn enough about statistics to be anything but
dangerous if they tried to use the material on
anything important. And the course didn't do much
for the student's 'skills' at using statistics
software packages. Statistics is taught better, of
course, in a department of statistics but commonly
also in good departments of sociology, psychology,
economics, and agriculture.
There is a lot that can be done with statistics, and
to some extent now with 'big data' and more in
statistical software, more is being done. But the
MBA statistics course was only a weak start for
powerful uses of statistics in the future.
Optimization. There was a course in optimization,
mostly linear programming. Occasionally in a real
business that is powerful, valuable material.
The intention of the accreditation system to ask for
such a course was to jump start more 'quantitative'
management, i.e., 'management science', via linear
programming and optimization more generally. And
there are some applications, e.g., there is a
chemical engineering professor at Princeton who has
apparently some good uses for optimization in the
petroleum refining in Houston. And optimization for
airline plane and crew scheduling is a solid
application.
Linear programing and other parts of optimization
long were the basis of a major fraction of the Nobel
prizes in economics; the connection with any real
economy or business was mostly in the eye of the
beholder.
Mostly mathematical optimization still has yet to
catch on strongly more generally. Maybe in the
future with more data, software, and computer
automation optimization will have a new day. So the
teaching of optimization was something of a long
shot bet on the distant future.
Having a fast algorithm that shows that P = NP might
get optimization going again in business. For
problems where would want such an algorithm, commonly
can do well now, but the work is mostly one problem
at a time, slow, expensive, and risky, and a fast
algorithm that shows that P = NP might do wonders
for 'ease of use'.
Also if optimization becomes more important, then
the work will likely be done by specialists from
departments of applied math, civil engineering, etc.
in specialized groups or outside companies. So, for
an MBA, optimization would be mostly only to make
them an 'educated consumer' rather than an actual
practitioner.
Finance. The finance course would be good for
someone who was still struggling with compound
interest but would not help much in serious work at,
say, the CFO's office of a major company, Goldman
Sachs, or a hedge fund. The course did mention the
Sharpe capital asset pricing model. Of course the
linear algebra and statistics needed for the
Markowitz model would be a struggle! For stochastic
differential equations for 'continuous time
finance', that is not very popular in the US, in
business schools or anywhere. There are a few
professors -- Karatzas at Columbia, Avellaneda at
Courant, Cinlar at Princeton, Shreve at CMU, Merton
at MIT, a few more.
Labor Law. The course in labor law might be good
for someone who never heard anything about such
issues, but the professor teaching the course had
never negotiated an actual labor agreement. One of
my students had negotiated labor agreements for his
family's business and had bad things to say about
the labor law course.
Organizational Behavior. Some guys with backgrounds
in psychology and sociology were teaching the
organizational behavior course. My brother, Ph.D.
in political science, also taught such a course in a
program of public administration. One of the ideas
is 'goal subordination' where a middle manager is
motivated to act in ways that give him a short term
advantage at a long term cost to the business. Not
very deep material but maybe worthwhile.
Generally college and university courses can be good
if they are intellectually challenging and, thus,
help the student learn how to work hard and think,
work, and write carefully, but the business school
courses were not very challenging in that sense.
The business school was respected in a radius of 200
miles or so: Significant businesses, some
nationally known, would come and recruit.
Likely some of the students met other students who
would likely be useful to them in the future.
The business school full professors, chairs, and
deans really didn't have any very clear idea just
what the business school should teach, especially at
the MBA level. The most important influence was to
try, although not very seriously, to do 'research'
as in physics envy. Contact with actual businesses
was discouraged. E.g., there were plenty of talks
by graduate students and professors with solutions
looking for problems but essentially no talks by
business people with problems looking for solutions.
E.g., the idea of having the business school be a
'research-teaching' hospital for real business
problems was not attempted. The school didn't want
to be clinical as in medicine or even practical as
in engineering but, instead, pure white as driven
snow theoretical as in mathematical physics.
Generally the 'research' was too far from business
to be at all promising for any practical impact in
the foreseeable future. The best research I saw
there was by a professor taking a novel approach to
attacking essentially the question of P versus NP,
but that work really belonged in, say, a theoretical
computer science department or a math department.
Business schools struggle: If they just go for
physics envy, then they are mostly watered down
versions of social science. Indeed, long the 'great
leader' architects of business education believed
that business school should be 'applied social
science'. That's asking a bit much of social
science!
If business school gets really close to business,
then it becomes much like learning, say, the grocery
business by starting as an apprentice in the produce
department -- students shouldn't have to pay tuition
for that.
In effect some of what is needed is for some
professors to look at the world of business, get a
good 'organization' or 'taxonomy' of its parts and
pieces, study those to identify where might find
some powerful, fundamental principles, and then do
research on those principles. That is, the effort
would be to look at business and 'formulate'
characterizations and useful, powerful theories.
So, that would be trying to make something clear and
precise out of business that rarely looks either
clear or precise.
In biology, such work was long just 'descriptive'
but eventually some very interesting science. In
physics, too: The motions of the planets were
fairly easy for apparently nearly any civilization
to observe, and there were efforts to explain the
motions for hundreds of years before (dates from
Wikipedia) Copernicus (1473 - 1543), Tycho Brahe
(1546 - 1601), Galileo (1564 - 1642), Kepler (1571 -
1630), and finally Newton (1642 - 1727) got a good,
really profound, solution. Such work is not easy to
do.
For students, the business schools at Harvard and
Stanford seem to be highly respected in some areas,
e.g., investment banking, parts of management
consulting, venture capital, and private equity. It
may be that an MBA from one of those schools would
do enough to 'open doors' and 'make connections'
that the effort would be worthwhile for the student.
Still I question if much solid material was learned
in the courses.
One way to look at business school is as an 'effort'
to make progress against the apparently messy world
of business. Yes, it might be nice if business
school taught enough to really understand business
quite comprehensively and make getting wealthy
routine. But it turns out that nearly any
advantage, even one that is seemingly small, could,
at some point in a business career, result in some
large gains.