Business School

Apparently, "MBA are MIA". This is a main story of this week Business Week who reports that applications are down this year, which gives some serious headaches to the deans of the top 7 US business schools. The main reasons are pressure from European schools, increasing tuition and the fact that more companies are promoting their superstar employees, even though they have no MBA.

The major consequence is that schools are becoming less selective, which is probably not a good thing since lowering their recruitment standards will lower the quality of the class and may even produce poor managers. This in turn will decrease the value of the MBA that many people are now openly criticizing. Henry Mintzberg, Professor of Management and author of Managers Not MBAs, is going as far as to declare that MBAs are producing poor leaders who, once catapulted in management positions, are causing severe damage to the society. This is a bit strong and yet, when one looks at the Enrons scandals of the last years, many of the executives had MBAs...

So is an MBA worth the money? Although I'm biaised (I am currently studying for an MBA), I would definitely argue that it does. It clearly broadens your understanding of how a business operates, in particular for someone like me with a previous engineer degree. Yet, it doesn't teaches you everything and it clearly does not compensate for real business experience so I think it's important to realize that there is still a (very) long road to go before that CEO position, once you graduate.