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Category: Education

The Education of an MBA: That Was Then, This Is Now

Earlier this week, I discussed signalling, both in the context of the recent trend toward “admitting failure” in development policy and in the context of corporate social responsibility in the business world. Wikipedia describes signalling as

The idea that one party (termed the agent) credibly conveys some information about itself to another party (the principal). For example, in Michael Spence’s job-market signalling model, (potential) employees send a signal about their ability level to the employer by acquiring certain education credentials. The informational value of the credential comes from the fact that the employer assumes it is positively correlated with having greater ability.

Not only that — the agent also has to incur a real cost in order to send the signal, otherwise the signal is simply not credible. Moreover, sending the signal need not involve any productive aim other than signalling. The classic example of signalling among economists is getting an MBA, which is costly both in terms of tuition and forgone wages.

So much for the costliness of getting an MBA. How productive is getting an MBA? Michael Ryall, who teaches at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and who guest-blogs over at orgtheory.net, has written a few excellent posts on how the content of an MBA education has changed in 30 years. Here is a good excerpt from his latest post:

Do Democrats and Republicans Grade Differently?

Apparently:

“When it comes to grading, Republican and Democratic professors at one unnamed elite university put their ideologies into practice, a new study finds: Republicans welcomed inequality, handing out more very high and very low grades, and Democrats’ grades grouped more tightly around the average.

Republicans also gave black students lower grades than their colleagues. In both cases, the researchers stressed, there was no way to know which approach better reflected students’ performance.”