I took some of the Wharton first year MBA classes for free on Coursera. Left me incredulous that people take out huge loans for that stuff. It's Wharton, though, so the signaling alone may be worth the price.
> It's Wharton, though, so the signaling alone may be worth the price.
You’re (mostly) not paying for the content of the courses.
Reasons to go/pay (in no particular order):
1. It’s a finishing school, with all the good and bad that implies. Some of the details below fall into that category.
2. Developing your peer network. Includes classmates, professors, and alumni.
3. Access to incredible research opportunities and research resources (yes, even for MBAs).
4. Access to jobs that (mostly) only go to grads of Wharton and similar. Think consulting and IB.
5. Access to job networks of niche and often super interesting jobs via peers and professors.
6. Signaling, although this does work both ways. While it opens doors for some jobs, it makes you overqualified for others.
7. Being in an environment of driven and (mostly) competent people. The scope of “what is possible” will probably be redefined for most/many Wharton students. (This might be worded somewhat poorly… not exactly sure how to say it).
8. Related to 7, being graded on a curve against motivated and competent peers can… build character. I’m not sure what it’s like these days.
9. In the past, there were some niche concentration courses that were super interesting. I’m not sure what they are now, and I’m not sure they make it to MOOCs.
10. Wharton Follies.
To close, if someone goes to Wharton primarily for access to the classes, then I would say that they have pretty much failed Wharton, regardless of what their grades end up being. Most of the knowledge from the classes can be gained more easily and cheaply in other ways.
I always thought the sums people were paying for MBAs was absolutely outrageous. In tech I feel like MBAs can actually work against you and can be perceived as a red flag. I knew someone a decade ago who paid I believe $120k to Duke Fuqua for a mostly online MBA that also required travel to multiple international destinations. This was a person in their late 20s.
An MBA is a prerequisite for many high level jobs. Management consulting partner, investment banking managing director are just a few. There are paths to those roles that don’t include an MBA, but they are rare.
The reason people pay is the math works out. Spending $120k to unlock career tracks that include roles that pay $500,000 or more is a pretty straightforward cost-benefit analysis.
My spouse did an MBA at a top school and 15 years out a very large chunk of the class are CEOs of large corporations, founders of private equity firms, etc.
The value is mostly in the signaling and network. Being able to get time with half a dozen CEOs simply because you went to the same school is invaluable.
It's also true that MBAs used to be quite a bit cheaper, even accounting for inflation, and that there were almost certainly fewer opportunities for people with "just" solid STEM chops to earn much beyond mid-level professional salaries.
I’ve done part of an MBA program. I’ve only hit pause because I couldn’t make the workload work with how demanding my job is at the moment. That does mean that beyond experiencing the program itself, I spent a fair bit of time looking at MBA program curricula. What I found was a pretty significant amount of study into areas that to me seem integral to actually running a business in reality. The sort of stuff that techies love to pretend doesn’t exist, or that they can just intuit with a combination of reading a few Wikipedia articles + their largely incorrectly self-identified transferable expertise.
I don’t know if my MBA program is particularly good. Whilst it’s run by a legitimate institution it’s certainly not a particularly prestigious one. I’d expect that it is in a lot of ways very middle-of-the-road.
One thing it has done is reaffirm my pre-existing vague suspicion that, whilst there are obviously no shortage of formulaic, uninspired, and largely street-dumb MBAs out there, a lot of the hate for those with an MBA that I see in communities like Hacker News is probably misdirected hatred toward the realities of business. Especially given how many people here have grown up in a zero-interest environment where they could bounce from place to place being paid very well to sit around in beanbag chairs thinking about engineering problems whilst the money fairies without fail backed truckload after truckload of cash up to their San Francisco office loading docks.
