The same folks here who crap on MBAs, will also get super excited about Y Combinator Startup School, despite both of them teaching about business. Lets go through the Y Combinator Startup School curriculum and I'll put the MBA version in square brackets[]. Startup School 2019 Orientation: How to Talk to Users [ MBA: Business Communication, Marketing/Strategy ], How to Evaluate Startup Ideas Pt. 1 [ MBA: Marketing/Str…
90% Marketing, 10% Misc - one could hire an marketing expert or learn on their own, no need for MBA or YC for that.
Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications
201–210 of 226 posts
Re: Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
C'mon. My Top 10 CS school expected me to put in 60h/week and was pushing me beyond my limits most of the time. My "quant-heavy" MBA required me once to spend 8h/week. If you find MBA difficult, you are probably doing something wrong. Old-school MBA is about networking (basically drinking buddies for life), new trends are about connecting tech people with VCs to use each other to build something new and profitable. M…
Did you find your MBA valuable?
Re: Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications
#203I was ready to rant about my own experience with MBA students put in pseudo management situations who can't iron their own shirt or couldn't schedule people's hours at a Wendy's... but then I realized this article is about Elite programs. So I wonder are the Elite programs significantly different than other programs? One of my biggest problems encountering MBA students released into the wild is that so many have limi…
not sure what the threshold is for 'elite' but a top MBA program will generally require some years of work experience, but not necessarily responsibility for other people. Most people in MBA programs are there to either a) help jump their career into a higher bracket (i.e. management) at companies where having an MBA is one of HR's checkboxes or b) move into consulting.
Re: Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
90% Marketing, 10% Misc - one could hire an marketing expert or learn on their own, no need for MBA or YC for that.
YC Startup School maybe is 90% marketing. But in business school, you learn more accounting, business law, economics, operations management, decision-making. And more thorough coverage of finance instead Series ABCs.
Re: Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications
#205The same folks here who crap on MBAs, will also get super excited about Y Combinator Startup School, despite both of them teaching about business. Lets go through the Y Combinator Startup School curriculum and I'll put the MBA version in square brackets[]. Startup School 2019 Orientation: How to Talk to Users [ MBA: Business Communication, Marketing/Strategy ], How to Evaluate Startup Ideas Pt. 1 [ MBA: Marketing/Str…
I don't see a lot of people crapping on the content presented at MBA programs. MBA-style case studies are actually pretty fun. The thing they're crapping on is the average quality of the people that come out of these MBA programs, as a group . If the people coming into your program are largely pampered, entitled idiots, and as an institution, you throw away your old work experience requirements so that you can rake i…
Yeah that's my thought for fixing MBA programs. Require an bachelor's degree in some other field. And 2000 hours of management experience.
Re: Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
YC Startup School maybe is 90% marketing. But in business school, you learn more accounting, business law, economics, operations management, decision-making. And more thorough coverage of finance instead Series ABCs.
that's a fair point, however Peter Drucker the famous Management Guru said "Business has two basic functions - marketing and innovation" so all the other subjects don't really matter in the larger scheme of things.
Re: Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but it is not a tough exam Ideally you don't want a test that's too easy or too tough. You want a test whose results form a normal distribution bell curve.
Such logic leaves you with no idea if the top X% is qualified or not, just that they are the top X%. You need to enumerate requirements and test against them. Same thinking leads to weed out classes that just pointlessly limit the number in some profession. Saying "wow, everyone passed calculus, that can't be right" and making the test harder serves no one.
That's what MBA schools want. They want to know who are the top students on the GMAT: how does XYZ candidate compare to their peers?
If you don't have a normal bell curve distribution and the results are skewed hard to the left (very difficult test) or hard to the right (very easy test), then you lose the ability to discern the relative aptitude of the test takers.
> You need to enumerate requirements and test against them.
That's beside the point. The GMAT is just one of many criteria that allow schools to determine who is a qualified candidate for admission into their MBA program.
> Saying "wow, everyone passed calculus, that can't be right" and making the test harder serves no one.
You're talking about something completely different altogether. Sure, for classrooms (i.e., a small sample size) there's a valid argument to be made against curving calculus tests or any other kind of test. After all, in a classroom the goal is to evaluate who understands the course material -- not to necessarily to rank the students.
However, the GMAT is a whole different ball game. The purpose is to provide a relative ranking of the test takers. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of people take the test every year -- a massive sample size. You should expect to see a normal distribution if your test effectively serves it's intended goal of ranking the aptitude of the test takers.
Re: Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The desperation for local experience can really suppress wages in some fields. Isn't that good for the Canadian economy too? I'm sure it's not great for Canadians looking for a job, but access to high-quality talent at below-market rates seems like it would be win/win.
Sure, but the benefits of that aren’t well distributed. Those that are well-established in their wealth/careers get to double dip at no cost.
But if a country did that, taxed top brackets more heavily, and then specifically allocated those revenues to upskilling, it wouldn't be a bad thing.
The post-globalism issue is that no one redistributed those profits.
Re: Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reorientation of companies, driven by MBA conventional wisdom, into shareholder-centric, stock-price optimizing machines has come at the detriment of building long term value and delivering better products to customers. Rebuttal? And let's center our conversation on the average MBA graduate. I'm sure there are schools with different approaches, but no true Scotsman doesn't seem like it would be productive.
@airstrike is pretty on point, but here's some more. A private business is always shareholder centric. Anything else would be schizophrenic. Non-profits and government organisations are different, but thinking that people start a business NOT because they want to earn money is insane. What you are talking about is the agency problem where CEOs manipulate financials of a company to reach their bonus targets. That's on…
Tl;dr - Academic economic theories in the 1970s, as implemented by MBAs in the 1980s, represented a sea change in how a publicly listed company was expected to behave.
Previously, it had been a balance (to taste) of "fairness", "return to workers", "social good", and "shareholder profit."
Post, shareholder profit was weighted above all else.
The argument was that this would result in better managed, more efficient, more productive companies.
I'm not sure history has born that out...
Re: Elite MBA Programs Report Steep Drop in Applications
#210The same folks here who crap on MBAs, will also get super excited about Y Combinator Startup School, despite both of them teaching about business. Lets go through the Y Combinator Startup School curriculum and I'll put the MBA version in square brackets[]. Startup School 2019 Orientation: How to Talk to Users [ MBA: Business Communication, Marketing/Strategy ], How to Evaluate Startup Ideas Pt. 1 [ MBA: Marketing/Str…
I don't see a lot of people crapping on the content presented at MBA programs. MBA-style case studies are actually pretty fun. The thing they're crapping on is the average quality of the people that come out of these MBA programs, as a group . If the people coming into your program are largely pampered, entitled idiots, and as an institution, you throw away your old work experience requirements so that you can rake i…
You should really try to get as much additional information as you can about someone instead of judging them on a heuristic alone. Just a 20 minute conversation can be incredibly revealing if you're good at talking to people (which admittedly, is not a common enough skill).
While MBA programs produce no shortage of head-scratchers, I also know several MBA grads who are sharp as a tack, who are no-nonsense hard workers, and that any ambitious company would be lucky to hire. The problem is that all of them ended up at the big management consultancies.
And this is by design -- the consultancies realized that they can go chumming for suckers at the top business schools to get respectable looking worker bees, and business schools used this fact (the "prestige" and the high initial salaries) to market their programs and to justify tuition increases. This vicious cycle has completely eaten the elite business schools and now they're basically just feeders for management consultancies and banks. The success metric of every elite business school is the number of graduates they manage to shovel into these jobs.
But you don't need an MBA when all you're doing is parroting back whatever your employer's client wants you to tell them -- you mostly just need to look the part and have enough social graces to make the client feel like they're interacting with "one of their own" (read: someone from their class / social circle). So it's not too much of a leap to see that letting in a trust-fund kid with zero skills or experience is totally fine by bank and management consultancy standards -- they grew up around other rich people! They're perfect! Even though they're not so great for people like you and me, who might prefer someone who can think and act strategically over someone with upper-class social graces.
And the management consultancies really are a sucker's game. It's not actually "up or out" as is commonly suggested... It's more like "you make partner, and pay yourself disproportionately more for all the work that everyone below you produces, or you realize that the 'rainmakers' are taking advantage of you and you quit." But the realization can sometimes take a decade or longer as you suppress your gut feelings and get used to a pseudo-lavish lifestyle that the next-best-option-that-actually-allows-you-to-use-your-brain might not be able to cover.
It's the same story with big-name law firms. The salary distribution for law school graduates is bimodal -- $60-70k for grads of lower-tier schools or for grads who don't make the cut with the big firms or who go into public service, and $155,000 +/- ~$500 at all of the prestigious law firms (or whatever it was last year + 2.5%). But you'll be putting in all the hours and doing all of the real work for the next 10-20 years while some partner wines and dines and takes home $20 million a year off of your labor.
This is why I generally don't advise people to go to business school. While I know plenty of people who would probably gain a lot from a rigorous business school curriculum, everything about the program -- their classmates, the faculty, the internship, even the calculus when evaluating their offers -- will push them into making a decision that I think many of them will regret 10 or 20 years later. Most of the people who have asked me about this are quite smart. When I ask about their motivation, the common factor is that they want more leverage on their brain power. They want to continue to be the intelligent person that they are, but they want to magnify their output, or be taken more seriously. Contrary to some tropes, I haven't found many that just want to make more money at any cost. They certainly don't want to be "takers" (from "makers vs. takers"). But the management consultancies and the partners that run them -- remember, this is the pinnacle of success for these schools! -- are the massive fat cats of the "taker" world. Not only do they take actual money that should really be going to the smart people doing the work, they also take these people away from more productive and more satisfying opportunities elsewhere in society.
It's been interesting watching the career progression of friends and acquaintances from my parents' generation who worked at these sort of "make partner or die trying" pressure cookers. Four or five made the equivalent of partner at their firm, made obscene amounts of money, neglected their children (who are now in law school after years of rebellious misbehaving), are now empty nesters with a 15,000 square foot nest, and are largely miserable. Basically everybody else who left (after sticking it out for 5-20 years) wishes that they had left sooner. Sure, they made good money, but in their environment it was never enough, and they never got to use their skills in a way that had any sort of outcome, let alone an outsized one. It was all just extreme busywork.
I'm hopeful that at least some of the drops in business school applications are from people seeing this shell game for what it really is. The business school curriculum is interesting and can be quite valuable. But the big management consultancies can go die in a fire.