Posted on 08/19/2011 6:39:48 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
MBA grads are shouldering record levels of debt as tuition rates head skyward, making the degree a risky investment that's not often approached with caution or restraint.
In 2008, Brian Jenkins moved to Malibu, Calif., to start his MBA at Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business and Management. He had big ambitions for B-school, expecting the degree to help him land a six-figure-salary job in human resources at a top company.
Pepperdine seemed poised to deliver. When he was a mere applicant, the admissions director gave him a personal tour of the business school, which commands a stunning perch overlooking the Pacific. His student experience was "amazing," he says, handing top marks to his professors and classmates. The weather – "perfect every day" – was an added perk.
To pay for it all, Jenkins took out $120,000 in loans. But his six-figure-salary job never materialized. "The career services staff basically said, 'We'll help you edit your resume, good luck out there,'" he recalls. "A lot of [my classmates] found jobs paying $55,000 to $65,000 per year, and they were very excited that they had a job."
In fact, Jenkins' class earned a mean base salary of $69,167, according to Pepperdine's official stats. They also owed an average $66,242. When the economy was doing well, and there was upward mobility, MBAs made sense, Jenkins says. "People were able to manage their debt load."
(Excerpt) Read more at management.fortune.cnn.com ...
For example, UCLA, just down the road from Pepperdine, has a highly rated MBA program. A public university may have more options for assistantships and jobs, and being in a large metropolitan area may have more opportunities for jobs and internships while in school.
The last option, but perhaps the hardest, is to enter the workforce in your chosen field, and pursue and Executive MBA part-time.
A little research on Mr Jenkins reveals he is 26 years old, he went to Pepperdine immediately after completing his undergraduate degree at Cal State Fresno in 2008, and after Pepperdine immediately went to Cornell and got another Masters (I wonder how much he took out in loans for that degree). After all of that, he was hired into HP's Human Resources Management Associates Program last month, which should result in the type of position he was originally looking for.
To me, Jenkins sounds like a typical millennial, who believes he is owned a six figure job simply for completing a MBA degree at a private university, and who should not be held responsible for the risk and the loans he voluntarily undertook.
Maybe, just maybe, the current economic challenges will fundamentally change the millennials sense of entitlement and they will teach their kids you have to work for what you achieve in this world.
Managers manage things, leaders lead people; there is a big difference.
That says it all. The trick is to be able to spot the leaders and those willing to take risks and learn from their mistakes.
I’m retired now but I used a number of tests that worked well for me and my company over the years. There are all kinds of good tests out there, some of which can really illuminate the strenths and weaknesses of applicants.
Managers manage things, leaders lead people; there is a big difference.
That says it all. The trick is to be able to spot the leaders and those willing to take risks and learn from their mistakes.
I’m retired now but I used a number of tests that worked well for me and my company over the years. There are all kinds of good tests out there, some of which can really illuminate the strenths and weaknesses of applicants.
Most of my fellow students were liberal arts grads who needed marketable skills to find a job.
Looking back on it, it was an really good decision that has paid off handsomely in my engineering career.
Going to business school for a 6-figure salary is a fool's errand. Makes for a great movie, but reality bites!
Agree 100%. I was an engineering undergrad. I got my MBA immediately after my Bachelors. I think the breadth of education helped me in my military career and ultimately led me to the technology industry which has worked out very well for me.
The large number of engineering focused universities who have added MBAs has dramatically diluted the pool of MBA graduates, but the reality is most companies no longer offer management development programs, so if you want to pursue management, you have to get your management training outside the company.
My kid just earned her MS but had her "dream job" 4 or 5 months before she received the degree. So like everything "it all depends".
I turned down an ivy school for my (much cheaper) State U MBA some 20 years ago. (I had a kid and a mortgage.) I'm still not sure it was the right decision. Was it worth it? Dunno -- but I had FUN! I still use some of the stuff I learned on occasion. I wouldn't recommend spending a ton of money on a second or third tier MBA degree.
There was a time where in some schools you had more of a tangible, mathematical approach when they taught economics, accounting, etc as part of the MBA program. Historically, the MBA is a mix of accounting, economics, law, marketing and other subjects. An MBA should understand systems analysis, basic organizational structures, project management etc...
Somewhere along the way this degree has been watered down in so far that they teach the “art” and neglect the “science.” They have added socio, economic, environmental and so called ethical ideas to the curriculum at the expense of learning the more substantive concepts. Some schools punch out MBAs without ever having even taught a single class in the PMBOK.
The MBA is simply like ***MOST*** other education in this nation where the business of education trys to water it down and sell it to as many as possible, on-line, and with contemporary trash science and socio-psycho babble added because some in education feel that makes it “relevant.” The students that come to these schools have changed too! Schools have some fowl and ignorant garbage coming to them that years back would not even have received a high school diploma. In 1961 when my father graduated high school there were no people that graduated with “basic algebra” that can hardly read and not write a single coherent sentence. Today a college spends the first two years teaching what someone should have learned in high school!
Even if you go into the ABET certified engineering programs or hard sciences you'll see a dumbing down and the incorporation of trendy/faddy pseudo scientific trash driven by socio economic theories (i.e. global warming)...
The MBA is no exception nowadays, you guys simply have latched onto that degree as your rallying point in this discussion. In reality this is a far larger macro level issue across our entire education system where various people talk about different manifestations of a problem caused by the moral decay of our society, the business of education and the dysfunction injected by politicians that come in to help after every perceived crisis.
That may be, but hitting lawyers with dead cats is a special kind of fun.
I feel badly for the cats, though.
ANY job where you’re a productive member of society and not destroying others is respectable.
I don’t care if someone cleans tables and takes out the trash, they’re still doing something and I still have respect for that person in that regard.
They are? My wife got her MBA; the school paid her to go there. In fact two schools (both quite respectable) were fighting over who would pay her more.
With 5 degrees between the two of us, we've learned that if you're paying list price (or, heck, anything at all) for a degree, you're doing it wrong.
The problem isn't the rates, it's that people sign up for massive loans without batting an eyelash - much less actually spend a few hours looking for alternative pricing.
Several in my company got their MBA and went on to lucrative positions in upper management. Many got their MBA, and it made no difference at all in their career progression. I can say it was not for me, I truly disliked replaying the buzzwords for the tests, all the while thinking there is not much here, except the b.s.
It didn't help that I had a boss with an MBA who enjoyed using the buzzwords, which were nothing more than b.s., and rubbing it in our faces that she had the MBA and we didn't. Bottom line: the buzzwords did not help improve the financial condition of our company at all.
I'll have to stick with my opinion that there are way too many MBAs, there is way too much b.s.in the MBA program and they are trying to make a degree program out of what should be common sense. The MBA program would just slow down a true business entrepreneur, and would not help at all.
If the recession/Obama depression somehow limits the numbber of MBAs, then every cloud has a silver lining.
Several in my company got their MBA and went on to lucrative positions in upper management. Many got their MBA, and it made no difference at all in their career progression. I can say it was not for me, I truly disliked replaying the buzzwords for the tests, all the while thinking there is not much here, except the b.s.
It didn't help that I had a boss with an MBA who enjoyed using the buzzwords, which were nothing more than b.s., and rubbing it in our faces that she had the MBA and we didn't. Bottom line: the buzzwords did not help improve the financial condition of our company at all.
I'll have to stick with my opinion that there are way too many MBAs, there is way too much b.s.in the MBA program and they are trying to make a degree program out of what should be common sense. The MBA program would just slow down a true business entrepreneur, and would not help at all.
If the recession/Obama depression somehow limits the numbber of MBAs, then every cloud has a silver lining.
The phrase is actually a paraphrase of a statement made by Grace Hopper, IT pioneer and co-developer of COBOL. It is one statement I have always believed in.
Been there, done that.
The path is rosy as long as Uncle Sam funds the NIH/NSF big time, in fields in which you can compete for extramural funding (hard to predict while you are training — long hours for short $$). Limited positions are available in the private sector for all the grads they churn out, and most are very competitive. And if you have the wrong skin color and genitalia (i.e., not a source of brownie points under EEOC criteria) the deck will very much stacked against you in academia or gov’t. Best advice—save your money once you complete the PhD program to retrain as a DDS or MD (on your savings), or figure out a way to become an entrepreneur and/or self employed. Can’t tell you how many friends and colleagues have been dead-ended after entering the NIH training grinder....
The point is that the MBA, historically was a degree that taught someone tangible things you could apply in business where you deal with contracts, hiring, firing (law), project management, understand the financial position of the firm (accounting), have a concept of marketing, human relations, business and product life cycles, etc... There are aspects in law, accounting, the process of the PMBOK, systems analysis etc that are not simply memorizing “buzzwords.”
Ideally: MBA = a little law (as it pertains to business) + accounting (enough to make sense of what is going on within business and not break accounting practices) + Systems analysis + organizational structures + project management + some feel good human soft science garbage. It should be the MBA that brings a semblance of process and empirical methods to decision making. Unfortunately, as everywhere else, this gets dumbed down and they add all sorts of relativistic meaningless fluff to the curricula (i.e. ethics, diversity etc) over time.
Congressional investigation?? They are the ones that are primarilty responsible for the skyrocketing costs of college and grad school. That would truly be a case of the fox guarding the henhouse.
Thomas Sowell has written on this many times.
In education we no longer keep out the fads and trendy garbage that dominates this pop culture we live in. In fact the modern curricula is “evolving” constantly to stay relevant, which really means they pick up on every socio economic trend and incorporate this into their curricula. Political pressures and pandering has only added to this as well.
The student body has devolved into a bunch of ignorant savages that can't think. That's what so called “higher education” has to work with in the first place. We don't teach formal logic and fallacies. What we call critical thinking is no more than attacking traditional values of country, family, Christianity, gender roles, capitalism. The arts don't teach culture and values (their purpose), and religion (morals) have been removed from education and public discourse.
What does it mean if someone has a high school degree today? Does it mean they can read and write or do enough math even to do the job of a carpenter (geometry)?
I really feel sorry for these young people who entered into such deep debt for degrees. They are so screwed...or their lenders are. Which means tax payers are ultimately screwed.
My Mom got her MBA at Stanford and her classmate was Condi Rice. She did not “really” need to but she was old school, and it was something for her to do as an achievement..like it was part of a personal bucket list.
I already have plans to attend B school ALSO at Stanford but I am still on the fence about it.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.