Hi refurb, I compiled the statistics behind the white paper. We found several candidates with both MBAs and engineering degrees. However it was on the order of low tens so the sets are largely disjoint. We excluded it for the sake of clarity. Sorry if it wasn't clear.
When you say, "I compiled the statistics behind the white paper" I'm assuming you were involved in the paper when I ask this, so please excuse me if you were not:
Did you look at whether the companies had any employees or not? Or try to split the data out by whether they were lifestyle businesses or not?
We did not examine company size as we did not have that data on hand. We filtered the data based on known companies to the best of our abilities but that is an area we could devote additional effort.
That being said, an HBS study appears to confirm our conclusions.
It looks like it is the same data set. You could have used facebook to detect the number of people who list each company as their employer to build a more accurate picture.
It just doesn't say much if they are lifestyle businesses. Most businesses that are lifestyle businesses without technical degrees are owned by a variety of non MBAs.
MBAs have far too much opportunity cost to start a car washing business or some other small $50K/year business when even people in marginal MBA programs can easily make $85K first year working less than 40 hours a week.
