RIP, MBA - The economic crisis has exposed the myth of business-school expertise

I remember joining my first forum - I was 13, and everybody who said anything and sounded decisive was a "pro" to me. I remember telling my father that Squaresoft was making Final Fantasy games based on the work these people were doing, and getting mad when he told me that wasn't the case, because this guy said it online. I also find that every time I join a new "scene" online, there's the same reaction. When I was a big user of TheAdminZone, there were a lot of people running huge forums that knew their shit, and a lot who just got lucky and would spout pretty stupid things, and it took me a little while to realize that these was this disparity. Same thing with the writers on DeviantART, the community managers at Zoints, the popular blog scene at Tumblr, and especially with Gawker, which is the one that I feel makes the biggest rift in my online communities today.

On the Internet, everybody's a noob and an authority. If I want to diss Tim O'Reilly and say he doesn't know anything, I can, and somebody will read my diss and be influenced by it. On the other hand, there're a lot of people online who are famous for being famous: people like Julia Allison or Cory Doctorow come to mind.

Finally, there's the fact that we're all still pretty much n00bs here. The Internet's less than 20: this isn't like the world of, say, movie making, which has a century's knowledge to it. Furthermore, everybody's aware of this lack of precedent, and so everybody wants to be the person that gets known for the equivalent of Orwell's tips on writing. We're a very postmodern medium in that regard, because the discussion happens on the same plane as the publication. Everybody's as much of a celebrity as other people say they are, and there is no distinct authority.

I'd be willing to bet that 20 years into movie-making things were similar. In fact, the one similarly young industry today - the gaming industry - suffers from the same problems of amateurism and groupthink.

If MBA programs are a place where people are taught technical details they won't need to know to fulfill the get-rich-quick fantasy that brought them there, what are those irrelevant technical details?

What's your curricula, and what makes it valuable or not valuable?

MBA is the more generic one, where you get to learn fewer skills, many of which you can learn while working. Somebody with real finance skills, is more valuable in my eyes.

Having done a year part time program, I can say that the number one thing I learned there was that MBA is very overrated, and you can pick a lot of skills/more by being in the right place (small company).

It might be valuable for people that are looking into higher title in the coorporate world/consulting (an MBA is more like a gateway to some jobs), but for all those startupers, it is really of little value.

You waste a lot of money and 2 years of your life that you could have been spending creating a real product.

Now with all that financial engineering bubble going away, we will see the real value of the MBA.

Could you elucidate what is "HARD" ? I am NOT being sarcastic. I am genuinely curious, but I've found MBA coursework , (except in advanced finance) to be relatively easy compared to, say, a compilers class.

Running a real marketing campaign could be hard (depending on the context) but what is hard about the MBA course work in marketing?

Could you give couple of examples of what was hard about your MBA so we can understand better? (repeat, I am NOT being sarcastic or mocking you)