When I was growing up, the advice my generation received was to go to school and then get an MBA. I knew a lot of people that went to college, then immediately to MBA school.
Now, it’s not so clear whether you need one or not.
For sure in some occupations, it is the price of admission. You can’t earn a generic MBA, but you must have an MBA from a Top 10 school. Here are some rankings of full-time programs from US News and World Report:
Chicago Booth, Wharton
Northwestern, Stanford
Harvard, MIT
Yale
Columbia, Cal (Haas)
University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business
Here are the Executive Programs. By the way, part-time and evening programs if offered are ranked similarly with the same schools.
Northwestern
Wharton
Chicago Booth
Columbia
Michigan (Ross)
NYU
Cal (Haas)
Duke
MIT, UCLA
UNC, Cornell
My undergraduate alma mater, the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana, was probably the first major school to go online with an MBA program. I thought it was a brilliant development at the time and still do. Sure, you could go to lesser-known schools and get an online degree, but Illinois is a top public university with a highly-ranked business school. More Fortune 500 CFOs come out of Illinois than any other school.
The WSJ is reporting that more and more schools are getting into the online business post-Covid. For some schools, this makes sense. Not to demean Illinois, but if you are competing for students with Kellogg and Chicago Booth, online makes sense. Boston University has the same problem since Harvard and MIT are nearby. Illinois offers a pretty incredible online program that started far before Covid at a compelling price. Dean Jeff Brown has been a forward-looking dean at Illinois.
People want the educational aspects of the MBA for their own careers, but they don’t need the imprimatur of the high powered top school MBA. There has always been a demand for this and there always will be a demand for this.
Not so fast though for some roles.
Look at the rosters of firms in occupations like Private Equity or Venture Capital. Also, look at the degrees of the fund of funds that allocate capital to those firms. The lion’s share went to a top-tier school, and they even segregate inside the top 10 with Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton outnumbering the others.
Many top schools had to offer online classes during Covid. Many are sticking with them in some form or another.
However, it raised my eyebrows when I saw what one of Wharton’s Professors said, “To protect the value of the brand, we did not want to have a discount version of the Wharton M.B.A.”
It raises the question, what are you paying for when you go to a top-ten school?
When I went to get an MBA later in my career, I was confronted with a lot of choice. For me, if I was going to put in the time and pay the money I was only going to do it at a top-10 school. That meant Kellogg or Chicago Booth. I was rejected at Kellogg (not corporate enough) and accepted at Booth.
What drove my decision-making? For sure, the spotlight effect. When you go to a top school, you get to carry that school’s reputation in your back pocket. It’s on your resume.
But, the more important thing was the network. Who you went to school with, and who the alumni were. Another big thing was this: Do the alumni freely help other alums? By the way, anytime a Chicago alum pings me I try to help if I can. No qualifiers. I have found this wasn’t true with a lot of alums at Chicago. Hopefully, that changes.
How do you network? You meet people and build a relationship with them. You do what you can for them hoping that it might return to you in some fashion. My classmates at Booth were pretty amazing people. I learned a lot from them, especially because my life’s work experience had been so narrow.
The network was what I was paying for.
Can this happen in a Zoom class? Maybe. I don’t want to say it cannot. But, I think it is a helluva lot easier and more efficient to do it in person. I wouldn’t have wanted to take classes on Zoom. I would not have taken notes or paid attention. I would have traded the whole time.
I think top-tier schools are making a huge mistake by offering online along with in-person. I think it devalues not protect their brand. I disagree with the esteemed Professor the WSJ quoted above. If I were Wharton, I’d be adamant about getting people there in person. There is something to be said about physicality, and just walking to class on campus. The campus is part of the identity of the college. It can seep into your soul.
This quote sums up a lot of what I see in a lot of people these days. “But prospective online students have said they want a Georgetown M.B.A. but cannot uproot their lives for in-person classes, said Prashant Malaviya, McDonough’s senior associate dean of M.B.A. programs.”
Part of being in a great program, or achieving at a high level for yourself involves some sacrifice and risk-taking. If you aren’t willing to do it, you don’t want it bad enough and you don’t deserve it.
Everyone doesn’t get a trophy.
My gut tells me CEOs of companies that do everything they can to get employees back in the office will do better than companies that don’t. If I am proven wrong, I will readily admit it but my gut says we are all human and humanity likes being around humanity. Great things can happen when ideas are shared in real-time in a physical space.
Maybe they just network during the pre-MBA week in croatia instead now?
I grew up in Champaign and initially I aimed to attend and graduate from the U of I like all my townie friends (growing up in Champaign, this was the normal expectation) I moved away in 2004 and transferred out of state never to return. I never did get the MBA, but I did manage to wrangle a CFO role at a complex family office after proving myself through special asset departments and subprime mortgage trading floors. I was in demand as a consultant in the restructuring and bankruptcy arena from 2008-2014 and regretted missing the networking that you highlighted. Although I had intended to go to Booth (I still get marketing materials and solicitations though), I see networking in the IB/PE/VC/SBIC/fam office space is dominated by guys in their 70’s who aren’t eager to retire and even brag about standing in our way. Networking with the “next gen” that never gets the keys to power or promotion because grandpa won’t get out of the drivers seat means I dodged a pretty expensive bullet.