I don't see a lot of people crapping on the content presented at MBA programs. MBA-style case studies are actually pretty fun. The thing they're crapping on is the average quality of the people that come out of these MBA programs, as a group.

If the people coming into your program are largely pampered, entitled idiots, and as an institution, you throw away your old work experience requirements so that you can rake in those sweet sweet MBA loan / trust-fund dollars, then you shouldn't be surprised when you start to get people who can't tie their own shoelaces out the other end, and you'll have nobody to blame but yourself when people start to question the value of an MBA or when enrollment starts to drop.

Startup School currently appears to self select for a more intelligent and thoughtful cohort. This may change in the future, and I'll happily update my heuristics if / when that happens, but for now assuming lower quality from an MBA grad than from someone who worked through Startup School without any additional information doesn't seem that unreasonable to me.

To add a bit more here:

You should really try to get as much additional information as you can about someone instead of judging them on a heuristic alone. Just a 20 minute conversation can be incredibly revealing if you're good at talking to people (which admittedly, is not a common enough skill).

While MBA programs produce no shortage of head-scratchers, I also know several MBA grads who are sharp as a tack, who are no-nonsense hard workers, and that any ambitious company would be lucky to hire. The problem is that all of them ended up at the big management consultancies.

And this is by design -- the consultancies realized that they can go chumming for suckers at the top business schools to get respectable looking worker bees, and business schools used this fact (the "prestige" and the high initial salaries) to market their programs and to justify tuition increases. This vicious cycle has completely eaten the elite business schools and now they're basically just feeders for management consultancies and banks. The success metric of every elite business school is the number of graduates they manage to shovel into these jobs.

But you don't need an MBA when all you're doing is parroting back whatever your employer's client wants you to tell them -- you mostly just need to look the part and have enough social graces to make the client feel like they're interacting with "one of their own" (read: someone from their class / social circle). So it's not too much of a leap to see that letting in a trust-fund kid with zero skills or experience is totally fine by bank and management consultancy standards -- they grew up around other rich people! They're perfect! Even though they're not so great for people like you and me, who might prefer someone who can think and act strategically over someone with upper-class social graces.

And the management consultancies really are a sucker's game. It's not actually "up or out" as is commonly suggested... It's more like "you make partner, and pay yourself disproportionately more for all the work that everyone below you produces, or you realize that the 'rainmakers' are taking advantage of you and you quit." But the realization can sometimes take a decade or longer as you suppress your gut feelings and get used to a pseudo-lavish lifestyle that the next-best-option-that-actually-allows-you-to-use-your-brain might not be able to cover.

It's the same story with big-name law firms. The salary distribution for law school graduates is bimodal -- $60-70k for grads of lower-tier schools or for grads who don't make the cut with the big firms or who go into public service, and $155,000 +/- ~$500 at all of the prestigious law firms (or whatever it was last year + 2.5%). But you'll be putting in all the hours and doing all of the real work for the next 10-20 years while some partner wines and dines and takes home $20 million a year off of your labor.

This is why I generally don't advise people to go to business school. While I know plenty of people who would probably gain a lot from a rigorous business school curriculum, everything about the program -- their classmates, the faculty, the internship, even the calculus when evaluating their offers -- will push them into making a decision that I think many of them will regret 10 or 20 years later. Most of the people who have asked me about this are quite smart. When I ask about their motivation, the common factor is that they want more leverage on their brain power. They want to continue to be the intelligent person that they are, but they want to magnify their output, or be taken more seriously. Contrary to some tropes, I haven't found many that just want to make more money at any cost. They certainly don't want to be "takers" (from "makers vs. takers"). But the management consultancies and the partners that run them -- remember, this is the pinnacle of success for these schools! -- are the massive fat cats of the "taker" world. Not only do they take actual money that should really be going to the smart people doing the work, they also take these people away from more productive and more satisfying opportunities elsewhere in society.

It's been interesting watching the career progression of friends and acquaintances from my parents' generation who worked at these sort of "make partner or die trying" pressure cookers. Four or five made the equivalent of partner at their firm, made obscene amounts of money, neglected their children (who are now in law school after years of rebellious misbehaving), are now empty nesters with a 15,000 square foot nest, and are largely miserable. Basically everybody else who left (after sticking it out for 5-20 years) wishes that they had left sooner. Sure, they made good money, but in their environment it was never enough, and they never got to use their skills in a way that had any sort of outcome, let alone an outsized one. It was all just extreme busywork.

I'm hopeful that at least some of the drops in business school applications are from people seeing this shell game for what it really is. The business school curriculum is interesting and can be quite valuable. But the big management consultancies can go die in a fire.

> you throw away your old work experience requirements

Yeah that's my thought for fixing MBA programs. Require an bachelor's degree in some other field. And 2000 hours of management experience.

Startup School is a new shiny wrapper.

90% Marketing, 10% Misc - one could hire an marketing expert or learn on their own, no need for MBA or YC for that.

YC Startup School maybe is 90% marketing. But in business school, you learn more accounting, business law, economics, operations management, decision-making. And more thorough coverage of finance instead Series ABCs.

I got something really more valuable beyond these things. Observing how political organizations get. I was a programmer for 9 years before joining an "Elite" MBA program in India and the level of politicking among a batch of 75 people was mind boggling. I see that now in my current role at work and am better prepared.

that's a fair point, however Peter Drucker the famous Management Guru said "Business has two basic functions - marketing and innovation" so all the other subjects don't really matter in the larger scheme of things.

Much like the plumbing in your house doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things.

It doesn't matter to me as I personally don't bother and outsource the job - that's the point.

Usually I watch a YouTube video or two about what a plumber probably needs to do so I don’t get totally ripped off.

If a business does not have any understanding of the competencies mentioned in parent, they are at a huge risk of being ripped off by outsiders.

Then you have a "trust" problem which is another matter.

That is pretty much the nature of the beast with contractors; not another matter. If you don’t understand what they’re doing at some level, they’re probably just using you for billable hours. If for no other reason, they have other more demanding clients that actively manage them.