Rebutting a trashing of the MBA concept.

[Aeschines]

The Article
There is a weird chap named Gary North who writes a column called “Reality Check.” I got this sent to me in an e-mail. Rather than just being on one site, this column appears to be carried or otherwise posted all over the net on various sites. If you have any info about this North fellow and what he and his column are about, please let me know; I’m curious. He seems somewhat wingnutty or perhaps uberlibertarian.

At any rate, one URL where “Donald Trump vs. the Mandarins” can be found is here:

You're Fired! - LewRockwell

Although the article is a little screwy, it raises many false beliefs about MBAs and the programs that produce them, so it makes for a good target for rebuttal. But North, though odd, does gets some things right in his article. I’ll give credit where it’s due.

My Background
Technically I don’t have an MBA: I have a Master of Science in Management from Purdue’s Krannert Graduate School of Management, usually ranked in the top 25 or so business schools. Purdue now calls its degree “MBA,” however; in fact, I was in the last class of MSMs (of which fact I am very proud).

I loved the school and the people there: very down-to-earth and not all fitting the stereotype of arrogant asshole MBAs. Krannert people often go on to careers in operations or corporate finance. The school is deservedly renowed for its emphasis on quantitative methods. I found my education there overall to be quite “hard” and mathematics-based. The education I got there has been invaluable to me in my business career.

I have had many bad experiences in the world of business and am as cynical as they come in regard to what amounts to a loaded deck and a social system that benefits the elite. But I am not cynical about my business education.

Let’s Rebut
North compares MBAs to the mandarin class that ruled China. I don’t have much problem with this metaphor. It does reflect a truth about how corporations use MBAs, a truth that many people don’t realize: MBAs in most companies are mid-level functionaries, not the elite per se. Some move on to be in the elite; most, of course, will not (there just aren’t enough slots). Being an MBA does not mean power and glory; what it does mean for most top-30 school graduates is that you can get a job from about 60-100k, depending on a variety of factors. At least, that was the situation when I graduated, and it wasn’t necessarily true in 2002-2003, when a recruiter told me that MBAs were taking jobs paying in the 30s. The horror.

But North pretty quickly goes off the rails:

Our political representatives have accepted the self-serving opinion of institutionally self-certified academics in non-profit institutions, namely, that this special-interest group has the moral right to determine who gets certified academically and who doesn’t. Legislators have granted them this legal right by way of college-accrediting agencies, which then determine what constitutes a legal degree-granting institution.

The solution: The free market. What saves us from complete control by these mostly tax-funded, Ph.D.-holding bureaucrats and their certified disciples is the right of consumers to spend their money almost any way they please. Consumers, in paying for what they want, irrespective of the educational background of producers, keep the flow of funds flowing to street-smart entrepreneurs.

I share North’s cynicism about academia in general. I think it’s pretty clear that most of academia is a scheme to keep professors in business. You have to go to college in order to get a “good job,” whether that education has anything to do with the job or not.

But I’m not cynical about MBA programs because of my good experience at Purdue. These are not PhD programs in which one pursues esoteric, useless research for 6 or more years so that one can write a paper that no one will ever read. No, MBA programs last just 2 years, teach many practical and concrete subjects, and make you put into practice your knowledge as you go though lots of case studies, projects, and teamwork. It’s about as good as education gets.

The conspiracy foo about accredation requires no comment, I think.

The Mandarins have been least successful in areas of the economy that are the most dependent on mass marketing. But they have done their best to impose the functional equivalent of Chinese poetry on American business: the MBA degree.

He’s stating here unequivocally that the MBA knowledge is useless (or at least impractical) like poetry. Rebutted above.

Earning a masters in business administration degree is a very expensive project. It is extremely high risk. You may not graduate. If you do graduate, the degree probably will not earn extra money for you.

Ignorance. Almost everyone who gets into a program will graduate. And people who graduate from a top-30 or so school will almost certainly make a lot more money than they did when they entered. Some 23-year-olds who graduated in my class (members of a special 5-year-program that included undergrad) hit the 50s or 60s with no work experience. That’s pretty ridiculous in its own right, but the degree will help you make money.

[T]he degree probably will not earn extra money for you… [ b]ecause there are too many people with MBA’s, and tens of thousands of others are on the way. Supply and demand are working against the market value of the MBA. First, there is an MBA glut, meaning “excess supply at existing high prices.”

This is true. There are too many wannabe programs churning out graduates. It dilutes the “brand” of MBA concept.

Second, the information imparted by these programs is not useful in generating consumer-satisfying output, which is the basis of higher wages. This is the other side of the glut: decreasing demand from the buyers of final output: consumers.

Consumers don’t have squat to say about the value of an MBA degree–large companies do. The hire MBAs because (as North correctly states), MBAs have been trained to perform socially in a particular social system; but that doesn’t change the fact that a large component of that performance is knowledge-based and essentially meritocratic.

Large corporations hire hundreds of MBA’s, yet these corporations refuse to abandon customer-alienating practices. Like dinosaurs caught in the tar pits, they seem helpless in the face of competition from Chinese industries staffed by the sons and daughters of peasants. They seem blind to the implications of price competition of the Internet. They seek protection from the government rather than seeking the support of their customers.

I told you North was odd. This is wacko stuff. Large American corporations are doing quite nicely, precisely because they are screwing the American consumer and using Chinese peasant labor. That may be “consumer-alienating,” but it’s also damn profitable.

It is well-known that small businesses generate more new jobs than large businesses do. There are not many MBA’s running small and medium-sized businesses.

As we say in GD–CITE? I happen to be an MBA running a small business. And of course there are thousands out there doing likewise. Some inherited small businesses from Dad, some got sick of the corporate grind and decided to use their skills and MBA knowledge elsewhere (my case), and some intend to be entrepreneurs even as they start their MBA programs. Still, I will grant North the point that most people go into the programs intending to get corporate jobs.

Don’t these bright MBA-holding experts understand that the basis of profitability is customer satisfaction? No, they don’t. They got where they are by performing in a controlled environment that was designed by bureaucrats who personally have never met a payroll, who have sent their entire lives writing term papers that nobody besides other bureaucrats read.

You know you are Net-slumming when you read stuff like this. Of course, the importance of “customer satisfaction” is axiomatic in any marketing class, for MBAs or otherwise.

If [MBA program teachers] could run a business, they would be out there making piles of money. But they cannot run a business, so they get paid to certify aspiring businessmen as having what it takes. What it takes to do what? Write term papers.

For the record, you write almost no “term papers” in B-school. More ignorance.

North isn’t the first person to wonder why program teachers, if they really know their stuff, are teachers instead of making a killing in the world of business. In fact, this is an issue that the teachers themselves acknolwedge and discuss with students. It is the 300-pound gorilla in the room that doesn’t stay ignored.

First off, these people are not making peanuts. They get good salaries and summers off, like any prof. So they are hardly losers. But the reason why they are not all power execs varies. One marketing professor told me that he didn’t enjoy the corporate lifestyle and thus decided to teach. A lot of them are brilliant misfits who either knew they couldn’t make it and didn’t try or tried and failed in the straitlaced, conformist, anti-intellectual world of American business. That’s one reason I got out myself: Companies want bland conformity, and they hate eggheads, even those that make an effort to conform.

The next point is rather important.

Then why attend a business school? One word: Rolodex. You will meet members of the class above you, your own class, and the class behind you. You will be given an opportunity to “network” with them. This is the opinion of a old friend of mine, a graduate of the Harvard Business School, whose start-up company made it to the New York Stock Exchange . . . and then died.

It’s funny, but I’ve found it to be precisely the reverse situation: The prestige of having gone to a good school has been a great help to me, of course, but even more so has been the knowledge. Networking has helped me not a whit. At graduation we all went off in a hundred different directions, and I suspect most of us have not seen each other since (I have stayed friends with a few people, but they have not helped me careerwise). There were many international students who went back to their respective countries. There was an alumni database that we could use to contact graduates for help. But even though I went on to be pretty successful in Japan, a pretty distinct niche, I have never had one person call me for advice about getting into Japan.

But maybe it is different for people in the top five or ten programs. Since no one gets to experience two different programs (except teachers who have seen different programs or who have been students themselves), I have no idea what it is like to be a Harvard MBA. Maybe you really get hooked up.

Problem: If you are not attending one of a handful of very expensive business schools, your network’s connections won’t be worth much. You will be like a line of drunks, arm in arm, helping to hold up each other. These top schools are Harvard, Wharton (the first one), Stanford, and Chicago.

So, only four, total? The lack of cites or anything concrete here leads me to believe he’s talking out a non-mouth orifice.

Jeffrey Pfeffer teaches in Stanford’s business school. In 2002, he released the conclusions of his study of the economic payoff of earning an MBA at any of the also-ran business schools. Here is a summary of what he found.

Need a definition of “also-rans” here. There’s a big difference between excluding everything but the top ten and everything but the top forty.

…Pfeffer stated that you may be just as successful in your career if you do a two or three week boot camp on business basics instead of a two-year MBA.

Hogwash.

Professor Pfeffer analyzed 40 years of research on the economic value of an MBA degree. He concluded that it does not guarantee a successful career or a higher salary.

Um, figures, facts? No, there are no “guarantees.”

How many aspiring business school applicants are aware of this? Not many. The business schools’ faculties have no incentive to spread the word. Their livelihood depends on widespread ignorance about this study. After all, they are ill-equipped to compete in the world of business.

Conspiracies, conspiracies! Are we to believe that no prof at any B-school rebutted the article in any publication?

[Pfeffer] also said, “Little of what is taught to students in business school prepares them for the corporate workplace. You have to question what goes on in the two years it takes to get an MBA, if someone can virtually be equivalent in two or three weeks. What that suggests to me is that if you take a smart person, and give them a relatively short course, a mini-MBA, if you will, they basically do as well as the MBAs.”

Hogwash, but let me back that up with a simple example. I didn’t know accounting before I did my MBA. Now, of course, I’m no CPA, but I understand the basics and can understand complicated financials. I took several classes to get this knowledge; if you were to add up all those hours that would be a lot more than 2 - 3 weeks. These were good, hard classes, not fluff. So how can someone in a “boot camp” that attempts to do the whole MBA thing at once acquire my knowledge of accounting and financial statements? They can’t–end of chat.

On what evidence does [Pfeffer’s] startling conclusion rest? On evidence supplied by the free market. He is a wise scholar. He let profit-seeking organizations gather the evidence. Then he studied it.

Oh dear, signs of lib-nuttery. Those beneficent “profit-seeking organizations”!

Dr. Pfeffer said he has long been skeptical of the value of an MBA. He became convinced after a group of consulting firms and investment banks did their own research comparing the performance of business school graduates to those trained in two- or three-week programs teaching new employee’s business basics. The internal studies found the non-MBAs did no worse, and in some cases better, than their peers with a business degree. The studies also found more education did not result in higher salaries. For example, a study of consultants at McKinsey & Company who had been on the job for one, three and seven years found that at all three points, employees without an MBA were as successful as those with one.

Somebody needs some logic and science. McKinsey is an elite (which is not to say “good”) consultancy with all kinds of their own unique social and cognitive filters; that will hardly do for a sample. The same goes for other consulting companies and investment banks. Don’t make me laugh: These orgs are in theory only going to hire qualified people to begin with. The real question is not whether having an MBA made someone more qualified after the hire; the question is whether having the degree made them more qualified and likely to be hired than they otherwise had been. Duh.

Prof. Pfeffer of Stanford recently said, “Obviously, if you get admitted to Harvard or Stanford or another elite school, the very fact of your admission is going to increase your worth in the job market. Employers who hire brand-name MBA graduates do so on the basis of the quality of the student body at the school, not whether the students have acquired specific skills or knowledge with their degrees.”

The implication of this statement is that you can capture for yourself much of the value of an MBA degree from an elite school by simply applying to that school and getting accepted. Disclosing on your resume that you were accepted at Harvard or another elite business school can help you prove your case that you are just as capable as someone who graduated from that school.

Best-selling author and Stanford MBA Seth Godin suggested this strategy in his article in Business 2.0.

Yeah, this is an old joke. Only a fool would take it seriously. Anyone cheeky enough to try this strategy would be rejected by the corporate social system. Further, this idea ignores the socialization process that takes place during the two years of school, plus the dues-paying aspect of playing through the pain. Finally, it’s a canard because companies really do value the knowledge that MBAs possess.

North has a good point with this one.

Businesses want to hire the best and the brightest. Why? Because, in the long run, brainpower produces results.

Because of the Federal government, it is illegal to test for brains directly. Why? Because this has been found to eliminate too many applicants from members of certain protected racial minorities. The Equal Employment Opportunities Commission will file a lawsuit against companies that screen by tests, unless it can be shown that the test was inherently related to a specific job.

However, if a company screens by a business school degree, then it’s OK to restrict hiring for jobs in general.

This is pretty much true. Testing creates a “disparate effect,” the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission will come down on you like a ton of bricks.

Conclusions
I’m cynical about the world of business, but not about MBA programs in general. North is right about some of the social factors that come into play with MBAs and the companies that hire them and keep them around, but his arguments to the effect that the education itself A) won’t help you make money and B) won’t help you understand business are nothing short of ignorant columny.

[msmith537]

Well I do have an MBA and my conclusion is that the article is mostly bullshit:

• Students who come from the top ten MBA programs do have an advantage in that certain elite companies - the McKinsey’s and Goldman Sach’s of the world tend to only hire top students from those schools. That is not to say that there isn’t an advantage to attending a second tier school. There are other industries besides banking and consulting.

• Unlike learning poetry, my business school gave me practical skills I use in business every day - entrepreneurship, accounting, finance, marketing, negotiations, public speaking, project management. It really does give me a huge advantage over the non-MBA consultants I work with in terms of how I look at problems and find solutions.

• Most business professors are non ivory-tower losers like you might find in liberal arts college. My professors were former CEOs, business owners, bankers and consultants. My marketing professor was a former McKinsey partner and my business strategy professor was a Fortune 500 CEO.

• The Apprentice is mostly bullshit. MBAs do not have an advantage over the burger flippers because they are not performing tasks that require an MBA. Let them do a valuation of a company, put together an M&A deal, develop a business strategy or perform other activities MBAs do.
  Also, IMHO, Trump brought on the stupidest MBAs and lawyers he could find.

• It is also BS that MBAs do not start or work for small companies. My school focused in entrepreneurship and many graduates did in fact go form start-ups.

[Aeschines]

Good information, MrSmith. What was your take on the networking angle? Have your school contacts been a networking resource for you? How many years after graduation?

Where would you divide the various “tiers” of schools?

Thanks for further input.

[BrainGlutton]

Aeschines, for the benefit of non-biz-majors, could you tell us something about what one studies in an MBA program?

[Aeschines]

Surely.

Accounting.
Finance, which includes valuation of securities and businesses.
Marketing.
HR, including the legal aspects.
Economincs, micro and macro.
Strategy.
Operations, including logistics, theories of inventory, etc.
IT (they made us do the basics, such as using Access and creating a web page).
Quantitative methods (lots of statistics).
Public speaking/presentation skills.

Those are the basics. There are also a ton of electives depending on one’s school. For example, I did advanced financial statements, logistics, supply chain management, e-commerce (it was 2000!), market research, etc.

[BrainGlutton]

@Aeschines

One marketing professor told me that he didn’t enjoy the corporate lifestyle and thus decided to teach. A lot of them are brilliant misfits who either knew they couldn’t make it and didn’t try or tried and failed in the straitlaced, conformist, anti-intellectual world of American business. That’s one reason I got out myself: Companies want bland conformity, and they hate eggheads, even those that make an effort to conform.

Why is that? That is, why is American business so “straitlaced” and “anti-intellectual”? Is it because a business (like an army) needs that kind of organizational culture to function effectively, or is there something else at work here?

[BrainGlutton]

@Aeschines

Surely.

Accounting.
Finance, which includes valuation of securities and businesses.
Marketing.
HR, including the legal aspects.
Economincs, micro and macro.
Strategy.
Operations, including logistics, theories of inventory, etc.
IT (they made us do the basics, such as using Access and creating a web page).
Quantitative methods (lots of statistics).
Public speaking/presentation skills.

Those are the basics. There are also a ton of electives depending on one’s school. For example, I did advanced financial statements, logistics, supply chain management, e-commerce (it was 2000!), market research, etc.

I believe there’s also a degree called an MPA – master of public administration. What does it involve, I wonder, and how does the course content differ from an MBA program? Does anybody know?

[Aeschines]

@BrainGlutton

Why is that? That is, why is American business so “straitlaced” and “anti-intellectual”? Is it because a business (like an army) needs that kind of organizational culture to function effectively, or is there something else at work here?

I’m not quite sure; it’s nothing new. Vance Packard noticed the same thing in his book The Pyramid Climbers (1962). In the chapter "The Well-Packaged Executive, he writes,

These top men are likely to be at least mildly anti-intellectual and anticreative, although of course they consider themselves “creative.” Business Week reports a survey by Opinion Research Corporation showing the converse also to be true: people in “intellectual” pursuits tend to be antibusiness. Each group seems wary of the aims and ideals of the other. One testing psychologist showed me Kuder profiles on two men being considered for a “Vice-president for Sales” job. The graph sheet that had been marked Poor Candidate revealed that the man in question was high in “artistic,” “literary,” “musical” interests. The sheet marked Good Candidate revealed that the second man was low–below the median line–on the same three interests. This apparently is no coincidence. The psychologist said there was a feeling that people high in artistic orientation frequently are not “hard-hitting.” They live “in a world of feeling” and may be “hypersensitive and easily upset.”

The massive study made by the National Opinion Research Center on the kinds of college graduate who aspire to different occupational careers makes some interesting revelations about men planning careers in “business.” Students entering business proved significantly high in two of the eleven motivating values listed: “leadership” and “money.” And they rated significantly low in two: “help others” and “original and creative.” The report spoke of “intellectual values” as an important distinguishing characteristic of career aspirations. It said that in general these intellectual values “distinguish the more academic careers such as the physical sciences and humanities from non-academic careers such as accounting, business, nursing…” [Elipses in original.]

This difference in values, clear even at the outset of business careers, may help explain the rather virulent suspicion of anything smacking of eggheadism so frequently encountered among people at the tops of corporations, and the frequent lack of more than polite interest in intellectual matters. A highly placed executive of a multibillion-dollar corporation who is also highly literate complained: “If you try to talk to these people about politics or music or education or books you quickly find how restricted their world is.”

It’s amazing how relevent this book is over 40 years later.

I found “eggheadism” to be much more tolerated in Japan, but, then again, I was always put in the category of “foreigner” and not judged on the same terms as others. In the US, I’ve always been a sore thumb in the world of business, despite my genuine interest in business (I never wanted to go into academia), my willingness to conform, and my overall politeness and heartfelt concern for others.

The ultimate cause of this is, I feel, the dark side of human nature, or one facet of it: People want those around them to be like them. For whatever reasons, an anti-intellectual business culture developed in the US, and it’s a damn hard thing to get rid of. The secondary cause of the situation is, I think, the way male dominance is measured in our culture (and many others): the arts and reading are for sissies; real men compete in sports and the money game.

[MEBuckner]

@Aeschines

If you have any info about this North fellow and what he and his column are about, please let me know; I’m curious. He seems somewhat wingnutty or perhaps uberlibertarian.

Gary North has been one of the leading lights of the Christian Reconstructionist movement. You can check out a website he runs at Freebooks.com for more details on his theo-political beliefs. Although North and other Reconstructionists often portray themselves as “Christian libertarians”, they’re actually quite authoritarian; the movement’s basic idea is that all societies should be run according to “God’s law”, i.e., their interpretation of the Old Testament laws. This means the death penalty for such offenses as adultery, sodomy, witchcraft, blasphemy, and worshipping false gods. North has defended public stoning as the most Biblically valid means of executing all those death sentences; he has also called for amending the U.S. Constitution to limit voting and other rights of citizenship to members of theologically correct Christian churches.

North has also predicted at least three of the last zero collapses of Western civilization as we know it. Most notoriously, he was a major advocate of the view that the “Y2K bug” meant our modern technological civilization was doomed, doomed! Even the other Reconstructionists sometimes call him “Scary Gary” on account of his penchant for civilization-ending disaster scenarios and his fondness for harshly intolerant rhetoric. (Christian Reconstructionists, unlike your more numerous Left Behind-reading run-of-the-mill Christian fundamentalists, are “postmillennialists” rather than “premillennialists”, meaning that instead of supernatural End of the World being imminent, the Recons believe that Christians have a duty to construct a Godly political order themselves, and only after Christians have ruled on Earth in accordance with God’s will and Biblical law for some unspecified but lengthy period of time–“the millennium”–will Jesus come back and bring about the eschatological end of time and history. North, at least, still seems to have a fondness for giant disasters that take place within time and history, as a means of paving the way for the faithful remnant to Take Over.)

[msmith537]

@Aeschines

Good information, MrSmith. What was your take on the networking angle? Have your school contacts been a networking resource for you? How many years after graduation?

Well, as an alumni I have access to the schools alumni web site. I’ve been out for about 4 years now and I wouldn’t say that they have been a tremendous resource. It’s not like we have a secret handshake or anything like that.

I was in an evening MBA program though. Evening programs tend to be different from full-time programs for a number of reasons:

1. The full time students tend to be closer with each other. They all have the same classes unlike FT students who each take classes at their own pace and schedule. This means a much stronger network for the FT students after graduation. Unfortunately it is a strong network with other first-year consultants and analysts.

2. Evening students are working. The get to apply what they learn in class and network with other people who actually have jobs. FT students generally have to get summer internships and then hope they get hired back the following year when they graduate.

3. “Prestige” companies tend to look mostly at full time students for some reason. Many top schools don’t even have evening programs.

@Aeschines

Where would you divide the various “tiers” of schools?

I generally go by three publications - Business Week, US News and The Financial Times.

Pretty much graduating from HBS, Stamford, Wharton and the rest of the top 5-10 lets you write your own ticket. The next 10-20 are also well respected but probably won’t get you that six figure I-banking job. Really anything below the top 30 is a waste of time. I went to an unranked school for about 2 semesters and realized it would be a total waste. The students and faculty were of really low caliber in terms of raw talent or mental horsepower. Career services was also non-existant. Transfering to a better school let me take advantage of better campus recruiting (it matters) as well as provided a much better learning experience.

@BrainGlutton

Why is that? That is, why is American business so “straitlaced” and “anti-intellectual”? Is it because a business (like an army) needs that kind of organizational culture to function effectively, or is there something else at work here?

To a certain extent a business generally works like a machine. Each worker is a part of that machine and when they act with too much creativity, they produce unexpected results. It’s not that creativity is discourages. It’s just that business people like to see predictable results. Problem is that this can lead to getting stuck in ruts. We always hire from school x because people from there have always worked out because we have a lot of people from school x.

Also, a lot of business just isn’t that creative. Marketing and advertising is, but the day to day operations of a business are very routine and quantified. In fact, creativity and emotion can sometimes get in the way. You may have a business that you are extremely attached to and everyone loves and thinks is doing well, but if the “beancounters” in accounting show you that the numbers tell a different story, you need to make some harsh and unpleasent decisions.

[Aeschines]

Thanks, MEB. It sounds like my suspicion that this North guy is nuts was correct.

[MaddyStrut]

@Aeschines

Surely.

Accounting.
Finance, which includes valuation of securities and businesses.
Marketing.
HR, including the legal aspects.
Economincs, micro and macro.
Strategy.
Operations, including logistics, theories of inventory, etc.
IT (they made us do the basics, such as using Access and creating a web page).
Quantitative methods (lots of statistics).
Public speaking/presentation skills.

Those are the basics. There are also a ton of electives depending on one’s school. For example, I did advanced financial statements, logistics, supply chain management, e-commerce (it was 2000!), market research, etc.

We also had Business Law and Business Ethics classes (no, the latter didn’t teach you how to be ethical; it was more case studies and discussing what how to evaluate the issues, what factors were critical to focus on, and how to evaluate your solutions).

Aeschines, my father was a prof at the IU School of Business. I feel like I should refute your arguments just because you went to Purdue! However, you’ve done a pretty good job (even for a Boilermaker).

The guy sounds like a loon. Where are all his numbers? Did I miss them? You’ve already done a good job of taking apart the McKinsey case. However, he also mentions there’s a glut of MBAs. I’d like to see the data behind that.

Is there a glut now, or one that’s consistent over time? If the latter, he should know that markets cycle. For example, when I started with my company 6 years ago, we couldn’t find good IT staff no matter what we did. We were offering everyone in the company a $1500 bonus if they referred an IT person who was eventually hired. 2 years ago IT professionals were doing all kinds of crazy things to get an interview. Now there are enough good people out there that we can be selective, but we’re not getting crazies trying to shove resumes down our throats.

Also, is there a glut of graduates from top schools or is he looking at MBA’s from everywhere?

In addition, even if there is a glut, it doesn’t mean the education itself is worthless. Would a glut of lawyers mean a law school education is meaningless, and we should all just pick up a law book or two and start representing ourselves? Maybe the schools are just letting too many people in.

Finally, I (like others) take exception to his idea that professors at business school are all losers who couldn’t make it in the corporate world. As mentioned, many are simply better suited to academic life. Not all of them hated the business world or couldn’t cut it. Some of them (like my dad) just really liked research–the kind of research an individual company may not find profitable to support but can help advance the field of study. Others had already made their mark and wanted a change or a new challenge.

[msmith537]

However, he also mentions there’s a glut of MBAs. I’d like to see the data behind that.

Hard to say. Unlike lawyers which primarily practice lawyering, the MBA is a very broad degree that allows you to work in a variety of fields. Now there may be a glut in the sense that all the MBAs who want to be investment bankers and management consultants probably won’t be able to. That does not mean there isn’t a need for those skills in other industries.