I've watched a few people enter STEM for the same reason and very quickly burn out. Arguably holding an MBA and making good use of it, or starting a career in STEM and finding a niche (dev, design, ux, what-have-you) certainly has the upshot of potentially larger incomes, but just in passive observation I've watched friends go to bootcamps or take an online class, slap it on a resume and just expect the jobs to start showing up-grow frustrated when they don't, or they get rejected from interviews and return to their former careers tail between their legs.
It's not fun to behold.
There's probably an economic/era of data/wage-stagnation argument to be made here-that has people racing madly to these career fields, I'm just not qualified on the topic to figure out how to make it.
I’m not sure how to even begin evaluating opportunity cost.
I started a business, and had a successful exit, and I’m still considering the MBA for the next time. The reasons include: as an engineering founder I undervalued marketing dramatically and don’t know how to do it well, and I had a hard time speaking the language of investors. I want to add skills to my quiver that I found missing when I needed them.
How would you suggest thinking about opportunity cost, especially if you lack experience in one or both options? In order to make starting a business more valuable than school, I feel like you have to either be much luckier or know what you’re doing and execute perfectly, which is incredibly hard to do the first time. The things I spent time on as a first time founder are things I think I would have learned not to do in business school. It worked out for me only because I got lucky, but I did burn a few years and a lot of money. After having chosen to start a business instead of school, I feel like it might have been more efficient to go to school.
This is a really good reason. What are those skills? Would attending business school help you build all/some of them?
"I’m not sure how to even begin evaluating opportunity cost."
If I were to give you $100k, on the condition that you spend the next 18-24 months doing only things that would help you build those skills, what would you do with that time? Start a business? Take smart people out for dinner? Get a job at a company you admire, and spend the cash on making your life more comfortable? Sign up for a degree program?
But, building those skills may be far away from both knowing what skills I need, and from executing, right? I guess that’s part of my question... the answer to how to build those skills doesn’t necessarily have a lot of bearing on whether it would be better to start a business or go to school. Aside from what I might guess, how could I actually and meaningfully evaluate whether going to school is a more valuable use of time than just launching into another business? Maybe looking at rates of MBA founder success vs others is a start...?
These are all valid reasons, but I thought I'd mention that you may be able to get answers to some of these questions by reachig out to a local uni's MBA program.
Ask if they're looking to connect students with businesses as part of their capstone project. MBA students usually do a semester-long capstone where they work with a real business to develop marketing plans, pitches, product roadmaps, etc. It might be interesting to run a cohort of prospective MBAs through some of the scenarios you faced as a founder and see how they approach it.
- Doing a full time MBA at a top school (or any school) is a large commitment of time and money. If your aim is to start a business, then it's worth considering what you could achieve with the same amount of time+money invested in getting that business started. If your aim is to get a promotion then, again, it's worth considering the opportunity cost.
- Some of the things you'll learn during the MBA can easily be learned on your own. But 90% of us usually only study the stuff we find most interesting or most immediately relevant. An MBA is a good mechanism to force some breadth.
- The people who get most out of an MBA (from what I've saw at my school, and other people I know) are those who have a clear goal, and have done some research beforehand about how an MBA from their chosen school will help them to get there. Those people also spent a significant portion of their time researching jobs, and trying to meet people to get leads. They didn't just focus on the classes until near graduation, and then apply via standard processes. They were focused on their goal (e.g. 'M&A Associate position at a top-tier investment bank') from the first day, until they got their job offer.
- There are plenty of people who pursue a full-time MBA as a 'break' from work, or because they want to learn a set of skills they can apply in their existing or future business, or because their employer (e.g. investment bank, or top-tier consulting firm) expects it and pays for it, or even just for fun. These are all acceptable reasons. But pursuing an MBA because you think it's a magic solution to $current_career_problem probably won't end well[0].
[0] This last part might be incorrect if you end up at a top school. Like, maybe if you do an MBA at Harvard you won't even need to apply for jobs, and people will come knocking on your door. I don't know. But I suspect the intersection of people who (i) get into HBS, and (ii) have unrealistic expectations of what a piece of paper can do for their career, is pretty small.