{"id":4018,"date":"2011-10-13T05:00:47","date_gmt":"2011-10-13T09:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=4018"},"modified":"2011-10-09T17:42:15","modified_gmt":"2011-10-09T21:42:15","slug":"the-education-of-an-mba-that-was-then-this-is-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/4018","title":{"rendered":"The Education of an MBA: That Was Then, This Is Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0Wikipedia describes\u00a0signalling<\/a>\u00a0as<\/p>\n

The idea that one party (termed the\u00a0agent) credibly conveys some information about itself to another party (the\u00a0principal). For example, in\u00a0Michael Spence’s\u00a0job-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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0The classic example of signalling among economists is getting an MBA, which is costly both in terms of tuition and forgone wages.<\/p>\n

So much for the costliness of getting an MBA. How productive is getting an MBA?\u00a0Michael Ryall<\/a>, 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.\u00a0Here is a good excerpt from his latest\u00a0post<\/a>:\"\"<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As mentioned in my\u00a0first post\u00a0here, I initially went the MBA route (Chicago ’81) and worked for over a decade doing real-world management before diving in to academia. Those were the halcyon days of research-backed b-school education. The motivation for an education of this form went something like this: (1) general principles of business management can (and will) be discovered via the scientific method; (2) general principles can (and should) be gainfully applied across industries, jobs, and time; and, therefore, (3) a graduate education delivered by the folks actually engaged in the discovery process has value.<\/p>\n

So, we read 30-40 academic journal articles per class. We became capable of digesting their content and, thereby, able to access new ideas 10-20 years ahead of widespread practice. We traced the trajectories of core research streams and, thus, came to recognize that subtle thinking is required of complex issues. We jammed into Merton Miller’s class, not because he was entertaining or capable of summarizing complex ideas into exquisite 10-bullet lists, but because everyone knew he was a genius and felt damn lucky to sit in his presence and glimpse into his thinking about finance. Excerpts from books by Tom Peters and other management “gurus” were not viewed as examples of special wisdom but, more accurately, of sloppy, shallow, unsubstantiated pap. That was a bad-ass education — one that served us well\u00a0throughout<\/em>\u00a0our careers, not just in our next jobs.<\/p>\n

What happened? Well, Business Week rankings coupled with the “Northwestern Innovation.” BW rated schools on: (1) student satisfaction, (2) recruiter assessment, and (3) research ranking. Northwestern, which was not a contender back then, realized that moving (2) or (3) could only happen veeery slooowly. Item (1), on the other hand, well, that could be manipulated almost instantaneously. And thus began the race to the bottom of the toilet. As far as I can tell, anything approaching the education I got has long since been abandoned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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<\/p>\n

Continue readingThe Education of an MBA: That Was Then, This Is Now<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,53,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","category-education","category-miscellaneous","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-12O","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4018"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4106,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4018\/revisions\/4106"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}