Doubting MBAs

Experts are starting to question if a master’s degree in business administration is worth all the trouble | Business Today Egypt

The searing success of MBA programs since the 1990s has clouded a growing dissatisfaction among graduates concerning the value of a master’s degree in business administration. Not only has the strength of many programs come under question, but also the relevance of the degree to meeting the needs of today’s marketplace.

Looking back on their pursuit, some graduates have described their experience as a “joke” or the “biggest waste of time and money imaginable,” as reported by Fortune magazine earlier this summer. This should come as a relief to those of us who are longing for an MBA (and who isn’t?) but can’t afford one. 

There has never been, nor will there be, a substitute for experience. Booz Allen Hamilton, a respected American consultancy, is one company dissatisfied with the assembly-line approach of MBA programs. They take their new hires through an immersion process of on-the-job assignments that last several months, business graduates notwithstanding. 


Even academics are starting to wonder about the direction their MBA programs are headed. Jeffrey Pfeffer, Stanford University’s well-known professor of organizational behavior, has fired powerful salvos against institutional inertia, saying “business education has become big business.” 

It shouldn’t be too hard to convince anyone in Egypt about the limits of higher education all of us have no doubt become intimately familiar with the illusory promise of a diploma, at whatever level. So, before becoming one of the mass consumers of an MBA degree, it’s important to consider exactly what you want out. If it’s a fast ticket to prestige and riches, then you better think twice.

There’s no such thing as a textbook manager: Young people who have never worked for a business, let alone managed one, are trained in areas such as marketing, production, finance, etc. under the current MBA model. But “management is not marketing plus finance plus accounting and so forth, it’s about these things but it’s not these things,” writes Henry Mintzberg in his latest book, Managers Not MBAs.

Mintzberg, a professor at McGill University in Canada, argues that the vast majority of MBA programs train novices in a disconnected, out-of-context, silo-like fashion. Nonetheless, the impression made on the students and promoted by the business schools is that they have become managers by virtue of their caps and gowns. 

Analyze this: Critics of MBA programs say they are too focused on analysis, and produce analysts who can recite every formula from business school, but don’t know squat about day-to-day problem solving. They are not the collaborative thinkers that businesses really need today.

Mintzberg traces the roots of this analytic attitude back to the late 1950s when the requirements for MBA programs changed to meet more academic expectations for respectability and legitimacy. The result was an approach overly focused on producing “general scientific knowledge which could be directly applied to managerial tasks,” writes Mintzberg. 

He dismisses this as too narrow a view of management, arguing that there is no alternative to the experiences that people must go through before they consider returning to the classroom. 

To lead or to get ahead: If management is really about fostering the success of others, as opposed to your own, then companies have a reason to be wary of MBA applicants who are likely to be more interested in developing their careers than those of their subordinates’. 

Mintzberg points out that “MBA programs tend to attract pragmatic people in a hurry; they want the means to leap past others with experience.” In other words, they are not thinking of ‘moving up’ in the same company, but rather ‘moving out’ to a better job.

Copycats and generalists: Today, business schools produce generalists who struggle to dig into special fields in which they can distinguish themselves and their employers, according to Booz Allen Hamilton consultants.

Ostensibly, this is due to the standardized, copycat techniques used among business schools. What they defined as the “best practices” or rather the best way to rise up the Business Week’s rank of business schools has become an unshakable model. But with general, out-of-context knowledge about business functions, most MBA graduates are barely qualified to meet the more practical requirements of leadership. 

Too many MBAs: Considering that MBA programs are often the cash cow of universities, it’s understandable why they have exploded to include part-time, evening, weekend and online classes. The result has been too many MBAs, too much of the same thing. 

MBA programs have exploded to include part-time, evening, weekend and online classes. The result has been too many MBAs too much of the same thing.Egypt is no exception as the number of institutions offering MBA certificates is on the rise. Besides the American University in Cairo’s graduate business administration program, Cairo University, Alexandria University and Sadat Academy are now partnering with universities in the United Kingdom and the United States to lure students with cash to spare into earning a degree from home without sacrificing the international accreditation. On the private business side, Knowledge Academy also offers an MBA program online through Columbia Southern in the United States.

Still, it takes more than an MBA to compete in a global economy. In a nutshell, the degree looks good hanging on your wall, but it teaches little about management as an activity that evolves with experience.  bt