Anonymous wrote:At what point would it no longer make sense to attend most MBA programs? Is it T-15 or bust like law school?

Depends upon what the individual's goals are and upon the COA at any particular MBA program.

Anonymous wrote:IU-Kelley & Georgia Tech are both bargains for instate

Yes, but they could be costly in terms of career opportunities depending upon the individual's other options.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most hedge fund and private equity types have MBAs from the top schools and they make $10MM+ annually. I am in the field and it was definitely worth it. Very hard to just have an undergraduate degree. It’s laughable that you even find this debatable.

Hedge fund and PE types aren't quants. Quants are the MIT/Princeton/Columbia PhDs at Jane Street, RenTech, etc.

no, the MBA is still mostly quant, which a lot of liberal arts background types need. https://www.mbamission.com/blog/how-to-boost-your-quant-profile-before-applying-to-mba-programs/#:~:text=But%20first%2C%20why%20are%20quantitative,involves%20understanding%20and%20analyzing%20data.

Anonymous wrote:[b][b]I got my MBA many moons ago, and it was totally worth it for the credential, the education (I went to a SLAC so hadn't taken any business oriented courses), and the recruiting. I went to a school ranked in the top 10 then and now. I earn 7 figures now and there is no way I could have done that without an MBA.[/b]
[/b][b]
The dynamic has clearly changed today, but for some people it is still worthwhile. It has value for people looking to change fields. It still has value for people with traditional liberal arts majors like English or Poli Sci or even Econ. It even has value for CS majors who want to have a broader skill set.

The opportunity cost is high for many people. It is not always practical to have an employer pay for a top school since they are principally residential full-time programs. And of course it doesn't make sense if you are trying to career switch. There were a handful of people in my program who were employer sponsored, but it was much more common among the foreign students. I had a lot of salary upside because I wasn't making much before I went to school. The potential delta is much lower now, but the top school median salaries are still reasonably pretty high.

Read & reread the first paragraph of the above post.

I don't know .... I worked at IBM for a long time. There were few MBAs in senior management. I met many senior executives that had no training in strategy, finance or accounting. Mostly people that came up through sales, and a few on the technology side. Those people could have used an MBA.

Whether an MBA is worth the price, especially outside the top schools, is a fair question.

In my experience, an MBA is required to get into investment banking or management consulting

Not if you do undergrad correctly. Tons of people go into those fields straight out of undergrad.

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Fair -- I knew two Princeton graduates that got into Investment Banking with degrees in English and History.
Can you advance in consulting without a graduate degree?


IBM is a terrible company to judge anything. I worked there for a few years. The best thing I did for my career is leaving that place. The talent was terrible, the execs were clueless and had missed so many big market opportunities, it's pathetic. IBM could have been a Microsoft+AWS+Salesforce+ many other companies combined. But the execs were so incompetent, they missed most of these opportunities and are now a shallow husk of a company.

I posted the original comment on IBM. I agree with you -- a terrible company. The point that I was trying to make is that the execs would have been less clueless with some MBAs. Sam and Ginny destroyed the company ... both came up thru sales, tactical, not strategic.

Anonymous wrote:I don't know .... I worked at IBM for a long time. There were few MBAs in senior management. I met many senior executives that had no training in strategy, finance or accounting. Mostly people that came up through sales, and a few on the technology side. Those people could have used an MBA.

Whether an MBA is worth the price, especially outside the top schools, is a fair question.

In my experience, an MBA is required to get into investment banking or management consulting

Not if you do undergrad correctly. Tons of people go into those fields straight out of undergrad.

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Fair -- I knew two Princeton graduates that got into Investment Banking with degrees in English and History.
Can you advance in consulting without a graduate degree?

IBM is a terrible company to judge anything. I worked there for a few years. The best thing I did for my career is leaving that place. The talent was terrible, the execs were clueless and had missed so many big market opportunities, it's pathetic. IBM could have been a Microsoft+AWS+Salesforce+ many other companies combined. But the execs were so incompetent, they missed most of these opportunities and are now a shallow husk of a company.

It's not even 2024 yet...

Anonymous wrote:Most hedge fund and private equity types have MBAs from the top schools and they make $10MM+ annually. I am in the field and it was definitely worth it. Very hard to just have an undergraduate degree. It’s laughable that you even find this debatable.

Hedge fund and PE types aren't quants. Quants are the MIT/Princeton/Columbia PhDs at Jane Street, RenTech, etc.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I went to Georgetown MBA about 10-15 years ago, after having a liberal arts/ non business degree from another top ranked school.

It was an expensive way to do it, but I learned a lot and it did help me get jobs I wouldn’t have qualified for.

As a woman in a class that was 30% female, it gave me a confidence in the business world and with financials that was hard to get otherwise.

I had 100k in school debt but I doubled my payments after graduation and paid it off in about 7-8 years. I also doubled my pre- MBA salary.

Agree it’s not worth it or required in most circumstances, but it was helpful for me.

Georgetown has a business school? I never see it on any ranking lists

It's ranked 24

Anonymous wrote:
[M.B.A. is] even more useless in Quant. They hate business & finance degrees. They want math, physics & CS majors.

I got my M.B.A. and Ph.D. in the 80's and became a quant. Yes, I worked with physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists. Back then, there were only about three real semesters of finance in the two-year M.B.A. curriculum. There was a smattering of economics and accounting. We learned spreadsheets, linear programming, and linear regression. That was cutting edge computer stuff back then! There is also organizational behavior (fluff psyschology) and vague "strategy", marketing, manufacturing and supply chain management, business law, and electives in all this stuff.

The M.B.A.'s curriculum has a little more finance, but it is still a generalist degree. There are now specialized masters degrees in finance, as well as information systems, accounting, supply chain, marketing, etc. You can complete one in a year. The students are younger than M.B.A.'s, with less work experience, and get correspondingly lower salaries. But the early 1980's M.B.A.'s often had only two years of experience.

The old M.B.A. was a good way to survey all business, have a summer internship, and pick your area. But if you know you want finance, then the specialized finance degrees give you twice as much finance in half the time. It is an efficient bargain.

It’s number 25 on the US News list linked linked in the first post.

Anonymous wrote:At what point would it no longer make sense to attend most MBA programs? Is it T-15 or bust like law school?

In the business world, M7 reigns supreme. But the top 10 or so b-schools are worth it.

Anonymous wrote:I went to Georgetown MBA about 10-15 years ago, after having a liberal arts/ non business degree from another top ranked school.

It was an expensive way to do it, but I learned a lot and it did help me get jobs I wouldn’t have qualified for.

As a woman in a class that was 30% female, it gave me a confidence in the business world and with financials that was hard to get otherwise.

I had 100k in school debt but I doubled my payments after graduation and paid it off in about 7-8 years. I also doubled my pre- MBA salary.

Agree it’s not worth it or required in most circumstances, but it was helpful for me.

Georgetown has a business school? I never see it on any ranking lists

Anonymous wrote:Most hedge fund and private equity types have MBAs from the top schools and they make $10MM+ annually. I am in the field and it was definitely worth it. Very hard to just have an undergraduate degree. It’s laughable that you even find this debatable.

Correlation =/ causation