Business School Is Nothing But A Waste Of Time And Money
By Charlie Rosenberg ’09
News Staff Reporter
If you are interested in a career in finance, getting an MBA is a waste of time and money. Instead of getting an MBA, relying on an undergraduate business education is perfectly acceptable: it provides the basic information required to step out into the financial world, where you will end up learning most of what you need on the job. And instead of being held up for two years, you can get a head start on your career and at the same time make contacts that will help your career in the future. Graduate school is essentially a costly, two-year detour that will lead you right back to where you ended up after graduating college. Wouldn’t you rather be paid for hands-on experience than pat yourself for a sidelines look at the business world? Even leading financial institutions today such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup encourage their most talented prospective employees to forgo business school. They also feel that the best way to learn about business is to experience it first hand, not in a classroom. The average business school curriculum includes a wide variety of subjects, many of which might never pertain to the sector you are interested in. Working at a company teaches you what you need to know in a more realistic and specific environment. Now more than ever, businesses and employment analysts view business school as an expensive résumé addition rather than a valuable learning experience. Dr. Randall S. Hansen, a writer for QuintessentialCareers.com, reflects this view: “A freshly minted MBA with little or no job experience is in a much tougher job hunt than a recent college with little or no job experience.” The basic idea is that job experience, and not academic experience, is the key to getting a good job at an early age. Getting an MBA is merely a hiatus from the crucial real-world experience, which provides most of the important education in the financial world.
However this is all referring to a general MBA, which covers a broad array of material in a short amount of time. There are other specific MBA’s such as: accounting, quantitative analysis, economics, marketing, and organizational behavior. These MBA’s are extremely more affective (in job placement) than general MBA’s because they go into more advanced specific study of a subject over a longer period of time. These types of programs tend to be more marketable towards companies because of the quantity of relevant knowledge gained, which smoothly transfers into corporate life. As opposed to a general MBA, which teaches a lot of irrelevant general knowledge, making it just as easy to enter the job market with an undergraduate degree.
An MBA is supposedly a jumping stone to further ones career, but its success in providing its students with a competitive edge in business is lacking, while hands on experience, especially right after college, is starting to become valued higher than that of an MBA graduate.
