going to get an MBA without having your job pay for it or any legit plan is itself a red flag to me in terms of the quality of a candidate. Why would you hire somebody who spent 100-200k(and even more money in salary opportunity cost) for a credential?
Judging by all the Harvard grads that get scooped up without issue and their horrendous problem with grade inflation, the answer to your question seems to be, yes.
Always better to go to graduate professional school (law, business) when you have a job lined up. Going to Harvard or Yale with no plan means you might get a job after. But if you don’t, after a couple years the degree is a scarlet letter. I have a friend who went to a good law school but graduated middle of class. He does the same job he did before, but is still paying off the $200k debt he took :(
How does that work? How do you line up a job 2 years ahead of time? Curious.
That's how the whole system is setup. The information you get across schools is practically the same (the all operate within the same laws, business practises etc) but the difference is that those more expensive schools are 'filters' for HR departments. So if you intern/network with companies you want to work at while you're working on your credential, you essentially are doing a multi-year application process.
If all that mattered is that you know how to do 'stuff', then paying for a brand-name school wouldn't matter, because the 'stuff' is the same. (except for non-accredited schools I suppose)
Always better to go to graduate professional school (law, business) when you have a job lined up. Going to Harvard or Yale with no plan means you might get a job after. But if you don’t, after a couple years the degree is a scarlet letter. I have a friend who went to a good law school but graduated middle of class. He does the same job he did before, but is still paying off the $200k debt he took :(
going to get an MBA without having your job pay for it or any legit plan is itself a red flag to me in terms of the quality of a candidate. Why would you hire somebody who spent 100-200k(and even more money in salary opportunity cost) for a credential?
It's a socially acceptable break from your work that doesn't guarantee losing money. If you find yourself getting specialized in an industry you are falling out of love with, your company doesn't offer sabbaticals, and you don't exactly know what you want to do next it's a great option.
That may be a Band-Aid covering a red flag, and this may be a special circumstance, but the people I know considering continued education are feeling this.
> Jenna Starr stuck a blue Post-it Note to her monitor a few months after getting her M.B.A. from Yale University last May. “Get yourself the job,” it read.
One sentence in and we are already on the warning track. A few months after, not a few months before?
Always better to go to graduate professional school (law, business) when you have a job lined up. Going to Harvard or Yale with no plan means you might get a job after. But if you don’t, after a couple years the degree is a scarlet letter. I have a friend who went to a good law school but graduated middle of class. He does the same job he did before, but is still paying off the $200k debt he took :(
I'll take that a step further: have a personal "business plan" for what you are going to accomplish and treat professional school like a job with that goal as your job description. I went to a non-top-tier law school, but I finished very high in my class and knew exactly what I wanted to accomplish (and was largely debt-free in doing so). I ended up where many of my Harvard Law friends did with substantially less financial stress.
Another tidbit, since this will probably turn into that kind of thread: I will advise anyone who listens that getting 3-5 years of work experience will, for most people, be substantially more valuable for prospective lawyers than going directly through to law school from undergraduate. The funny thing is that I finished so high in my class in part because, after working for several years, the bad parts of law school seemed pretty trivial.
Note this is a US perspective and other countries educate their professionals differently.
Always better to go to graduate professional school (law, business) when you have a job lined up. Going to Harvard or Yale with no plan means you might get a job after. But if you don’t, after a couple years the degree is a scarlet letter. I have a friend who went to a good law school but graduated middle of class. He does the same job he did before, but is still paying off the $200k debt he took :(
How does that work? How do you line up a job 2 years ahead of time? Curious.
Not really lined up like a specific role in mind. But I've worked at large companies that partner with local universities for MBA programs. And after going through that program you are first in line for roles that put the degree to use. So you'd need to graduate and get a job at a company with a program like that as a prerequisite.
Not exactly surprising. Large companies have been slowing down or freezing hiring and laying people off for over a year now. Did anyone think MBAs would be immune?
it is obviously a systems problem if you cannot place people who are capable. It is a bad signal when constructive inputs are piling up and wasted right?
I graduated with an MBA in 2008 from a top 10-ish school, just before the Great Recession. I had no desire to be an entrepreneur. I pursued the consulting track and landed a full-time offer from my summer internship, but I got laid off in 2009 along with about half of the firm. After that, I did contract consulting jobs for a year and ended up working on a project in China. As that project ended, I still couldn't find a suitable permanent MBA-level job, so I started my own consulting firm in China, which later became a contract manufacturing company. About 14 years later, I am still running my own company. There have been plenty of years I haven't been able to pay myself a salary of $180 grand a year like these top MBAs expect to start now. But, I also had a few good years where my company put over $1M in the bank. Now, it's nice to mostly work on whatever I want to think about every day. Economic cycles happen, just must make your own future.