The question is not whether it is worth it for an individual to get an MBA, but rather if MBAs are good for the economy.

I don't think anyone is arguing that for an individual, getting an MBA from a top tier university isn't worth it. There is enough MBA-run businesses with a heavy amount of nepotism to ensure it makes financial sense.

I wonder how much benefit an MBA from a top school gives beyond signaling. If you are admitted into Harvard/Stanford/Wharton/etc you've been successful early on in your career. It seems to me that pursuing an MBA at that point is an extremely risk averse move. Credentialing for the sake of credentialing.

While there are tons of successful graduates of top MBA programs, it may be a function of who is admitted and not a function of the value added by the program.

Most people on hacker news don't realize that within business there is a huge amount of types of business jobs. Most people go to business school to switch to a new type of business job. About 40% come from engineering because they realize they hate it and want to do something making more money with less hours.

If you had a great job, lets say Investment Banking, you may go to a top business school to switch to Private Equity. To an hacker those don't sound different, but they are worlds apart.

The biggest benefit to getting an MBA is that it gives you an excuse to interview with whatever company you want to. It gives you the opportunity to really change your path. Few other places do that.

I completely agree but isn't this really a failing of our current world/society? Many of our best and brightest spend huge amounts of money and two years of their life just so they can have an excuse/opportunity to apply themselves in a different field. Seems like there's something wrong here, no?

I really think you don't understand what wtvanhest is saying. Business is a really big subject. They don't go to school for two years to change from being an accountant to becoming a controller. It is much more equalent to going to school for two years to change from electrical engineering to chemical engineering. Sure the basics are the same but after that they are worlds apart.

It depends on what you want to do with your career. If your interests run towards being the next Tim Cook, then an MBA can teach you a lot and help build your professional network. MBA's teach you how to manage the capital structure of a company, optimize operations, etc. This stuff is useless for a web startup, but tremendously valuable for a big organization.

Three words: networking, networking, networking.

You are going to get in the trenches with the next generation of self-selected future business leaders. These are the people that will form of the nucleus of your professional network for the next 30 years.

Just thinking out loud here but is it possible that places like Y Combinator will end up fulfilling this role in the future?

Yes and no, IMO.

YC is like a new elite graduate school / bootcamp for startup entrepreneurs. Just like not everyone gets into HBS or Saïd or INSEAD, not everyone gets into YC.

B-school is getting more startup and entrepreneurship oriented, but is still aimed, for the most part, at general management at mid-sized and large mainstream firms.

They're too small and there's not enough of them to fulfil that role. Additionally there aren't very many non-tech areas with yc-type programs for them.

That doesn't mean it has to be that way, does it? I wasn't implying that the yc model is a replacement today, just that it perhaps could be in the future for at least some subset of people that are currently going to business school.

They're too small to fulfil that role.

A friend who went to a top business school after a brace of technical degrees and some work experience said that the only value the friend received was in the network, in the social connections made. There was almost nothing in the curriculum that the friend couldn't have figured out from first principles in short order. I expect the friend would agree with the signaling value as well; the point was more that there was little intellectual heft to the material.

You get to reboot your career and go into a new industry, beyond signals that's the great value of the MBA.