MBA graduates are also not fit for running literally any business. The only thing employers know is that if you come from a top 10 MBA, you probably check the box on being pretty smart (the GMAT is a tough exam) while also possessing soft skills, being personable, ready to meet with clients or manage people and probably well-connected. It's a pedigree that allegedly excludes the dumb rich kids

Now your claim about Wall Street is just uninformed FUD. Most people on the street do not have an MBA, let alone one from a top school, particularly on the Sales & Trading branch of Wall Street that is usually what people associate with poor ethics and exploiting Main Street

It might work ok as a way to filter out people who had a poor quality undergraduate education, but it is not a tough exam. I got a 700-something score (95th percentile) in 2011 on my first try with less than 6 hours of preparation. The math portion of the GMAT was primarily about doing mental arithmetic, and did not involve any mathematical concepts past the middle school level. The language portion was primarily about English reading and writing skills.

As far as standardized exams go, the GMAT is rather challenging given the time constraint and the fact that the exam adjusts to match your skill level with each response influencing the next that is asked

Ideally you don't want a test that's too easy or too tough. You want a test whose results form a normal distribution bell curve.

Same thinking leads to weed out classes that just pointlessly limit the number in some profession. Saying "wow, everyone passed calculus, that can't be right" and making the test harder serves no one.

That's what MBA schools want. They want to know who are the top students on the GMAT: how does XYZ candidate compare to their peers?

If you don't have a normal bell curve distribution and the results are skewed hard to the left (very difficult test) or hard to the right (very easy test), then you lose the ability to discern the relative aptitude of the test takers.

> You need to enumerate requirements and test against them.

That's beside the point. The GMAT is just one of many criteria that allow schools to determine who is a qualified candidate for admission into their MBA program.

> Saying "wow, everyone passed calculus, that can't be right" and making the test harder serves no one.

You're talking about something completely different altogether. Sure, for classrooms (i.e., a small sample size) there's a valid argument to be made against curving calculus tests or any other kind of test. After all, in a classroom the goal is to evaluate who understands the course material -- not to necessarily to rank the students.

However, the GMAT is a whole different ball game. The purpose is to provide a relative ranking of the test takers. Additionally, hundreds of thousands of people take the test every year -- a massive sample size. You should expect to see a normal distribution if your test effectively serves it's intended goal of ranking the aptitude of the test takers.

MBAs at the top schools demand intense team work. Without it, you won't pass.

My MBA experience was INSEAD, in France. For the first 3 terms (of 5), all work was done in teams of 5. The school chose the teams explicitly to maximise the chance of conflict (by maximising differences in background, nationality, prior education, work experience, age and gender). The professors then threw tons of work on us. A well-functioning team could just about cope. Totally impossible if working individually.

So we had no option but figure out how to work together, maximise the combined value of each person's skills, and rely fully on each other.

A few teams exploded spectacularly. But most of us learned how to work as a team and succeed under intense pressure.

An MBA is extremely team-driven. Classes are heavily discussion focused rather than having a lecturer simply teach a subject. There are lots of presentations and routine working with others.

I know all degrees have this to an extent but the MBA experience is exceptional in the level of collaboration needed. Because most of the people taking an MBA class have several years of real-world company experience, you end up learning heavily from the cohort as a whole rather than simple the "expert" professor.

I have a CS degree and an MBA and the difference in the amount of interpersonal effort between the two degrees is enormous.

TL;DR Admissions for top MBAs are very holistic, and schools will try their best to create diverse classes made up of well-rounded individuals. Some schools do this better than others, but then again each school is trying to solve for a different outcome and just like hiring, admitting students isn't an exact science.

Is there a chance they might get looked down upon because of the emphasis on the "whole person" or finding "interesting" candidates.

Poets & Quants MBA odds doesn't talk about those kids, yet they will freely admit many of them end up at a top program for their MBA.

(For the record, this is not me personally, but still I wonder how these kinds of candidates get evaluated, given the current environment)

There is a deliberate admissions emphasis on ensuring the class is as diverse (in terms of viewpoint and experience) as possible. An MBA class full of only people with finance degrees would be a poor experience for everyone.

Do any of these articles track what effect this kind of messaging has had on the number of MBA's choosing specific concentrations?

Yeah, it's exclusively for the smarter rich kids.

But go on, it's easy to hate on MBAs. It's the one bigoted view everyone is seemingly allowed to have.

Also, a lot of people have endured "elite" MBA's entering the workplace into positions of seniority with no prior experience and exactly the results you might expect under the circumstances.

I haven't seen much evidence to the contrary, either. All I see is anecdotes from both sides, so I'll give MBAs the benefit of the doubt. Speaking for myself, I am an entirely different person after completing my MBA. I've become an analytical thinker to a fault and maintain my soft skills. Learned a metric shit ton of corporate finance, business strategy and decent macroeconomics.

> Also, a lot of people have endured "elite" MBA's entering the workplace into positions of seniority with no prior experience and exactly the results you might expect under the circumstances.

Shitty people exist everywhere. You don't have the counterfactual to know if those bosses would be even worse without an MBA. Seems to me like that's more of an issue with HR hiring processes than with the intrinsic values of a rigorous MBA program.

Not at all what I was saying, but since you brought it up: MBA or not, I'd expect the outcome of someone with zero real-world experience being elevated to a position of making executive decisions would be universally shite.

Yes, it's entirely to do with HR processes, but nonetheless the reason MBA programs exist at all is because they offer students the outcomes that they do - outcomes that are entirely unwarranted based on any evidence that currently exists.

Where do you get the notion that MBAs have zero real world experience? That is factually incorrect.

"Actually, 40 Years Of Data Show The MBA Effectively Does Nothing -- It Has No Impact" - Business Insider

https://www.economist.com/whichmba/nothing-special-mbas-are-...

MBAs are no longer prized by employers - The Economist

There's a lot more links like that on Google, I'll leave it to the reader to find them. That said, I found this one interesting:

Https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://amp.theguardian.com/education/2018/mar/19/why-the-mb...

It's an article in the Guardian that, to give the tldr version, suggests that MBAs retain usefulness for getting jobs, but with no evidence of impact on capability.

What does that have to do with MBA's? The tech industry is littered with folks that look good on paper and can be plugged into some technocratic niche but have little real-world experience.

> Why, that seems like a rather silly thing to give the benefit of the doubt on. Hiring someone into a high responsibility role based on education rather than experience and proven ability. I don't see why you would do that...

Who said they are hired on education _rather than_ experience and proven ability? It's not like MBAs are 18-year-olds with no experience. As I've said elsewhere, you need to have at least 3-5 years of _great_ work experience to land a spot at top MBAs. I was promoted every year for 3 years in a row in one of my homecountry's top 5 largest firms and was about to be promoted to manager when I went to my MBA. The same is true of a lot of MBA graduates. And those who were not managers in the traditional sense displayed their leadership abilities elsewhere, such as the many veterans that join MBA programs.

> ah.

Great ad hominem. Go read up on HN's guidelines, please: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You mean like almost all other jobs out there?

Because foreign born people can't be rich?

What income percentiles are Harvard MBA students coming from?

I don't know about Harvard MBA students, I didn't go there. But you can go ahead and google each school's class profile. Maybe that info is out there.

I don't need a plurality of data to counter his claim that MBA's are "exclusively" for rich smart kids.

Originally MBA's where for 30 year olds on a fast track at big companies.

specious and unsupported statement. what "quality" are you talking about? what "downfall" has there been? when, how and why did "it" rise in the first place?

you're making a fundamental attribution error (a topic taught in an MBA program, no less) by hinting at structural issues that are much wider and far-reaching than a simple graduate degree.

make a reasoned point rather than trotting out a trite boogeyman.

Rebuttal?

And let's center our conversation on the average MBA graduate. I'm sure there are schools with different approaches, but no true Scotsman doesn't seem like it would be productive.

A private business is always shareholder centric. Anything else would be schizophrenic. Non-profits and government organisations are different, but thinking that people start a business NOT because they want to earn money is insane.

What you are talking about is the agency problem where CEOs manipulate financials of a company to reach their bonus targets. That's only possible for public traded companies and it's a well-known problem in organisational behaviour. Thing is, there is no connection with an MBA degree. It would be great if people needed an MBA before they would be corrupted by power, but unfortunately it's not the case.

you'd be closer to the target if you pointed your finger at large financial institutions like goldman sachs and the world bank/IMF. but even these can't singularly explain the business and economic trends we've seen in the past 50 years, much less the "rise of the MBA".

Tl;dr - Academic economic theories in the 1970s, as implemented by MBAs in the 1980s, represented a sea change in how a publicly listed company was expected to behave.

Previously, it had been a balance (to taste) of "fairness", "return to workers", "social good", and "shareholder profit."

Post, shareholder profit was weighted above all else.

The argument was that this would result in better managed, more efficient, more productive companies.

I'm not sure history has born that out...

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If this is the case why do so many companies seek going public?

However, that is not what the bankers of Wall Street now focus on, they are more involved in producing "financial products", packaging arcane structures primarily to encourage trading and thus fees from mindless turnover.

I understand there are bad actors as well as people making the trades that make money, but there is also an underlying reason the trades get made, typically that is often discounted by your argument and should be factored in.

The reason we can click a button and get a loan is because it is not extremely risky for the company to make the loan, because of said instruments (as an example)

==About 3,600 firms were listed on U.S. stock exchanges at the end of 2017, down more than half from 1997.==

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-04-09/where-...

Do you think the majority of people working in Wall St are involved in IPO value creation?

For the individual holding the MBA

MBA is useful to get overall picture of individual areas from 10,000ft so that you don't need to re-invent everything and have some semi-automated way to process things that are thrown at you while building/managing some organization. You should walk away with knowledge about what financial instruments are at your disposal, how not to completely mess up your organization with one's stupidity or lack of leadership, how to recognize phase of a company you are in etc. This is important when you get under permanent stress while running a company when quality information will be scarce and obfuscated, people's motives will be a mixed bag, and only subjects you mastered and networking circle you built will be with you.

I'm not saying that the skills taught are not useful, what I'm saying is that the concept of a generalized "business administration" course that somehow qualifies you to run any and all businesses is basically flawed.

Management is a skill or craft, not a profession. Harvard's model of case studies is a useful skill training technique, but anecdata doesn't make a science.

Blatantly false - and I say that as someone with experience with multiple HBS classes. This might be the case for a small minority at those schools, but in no way is it the prevailing wind.

You can easily go through an entire MBA program and concentrate in something like Marketing where the most technical class you'll take is Stat 102.

I know they like to select the smart people who have lots of extra money, but when in the program is all this stuff taught?

Being managed by someone with shallow technical skills and bunch of book knowledge about how to manage doesn't like a good time.

Tell this to anyone in C-suite please.