At any job I have worked at -- all in large companies, more than 95% of the work assigned wasn't useful in any way except for compliance with internal red tape and bureaucracy. It seems like most job interviews nowadays are based around convincing the hiring manager that you are on board and won't cause problems with lots of useless work. MBA programs are largely about giving structure and formal terminology to useless processes.
People really do not know how the game is played in careers that are inherently bureaucratic.
Consider this situation. An Asian woman earns an MBA at a well-respected public university. It is not Harvard Business School or Stanford. It is not in the top seven. It is not in the top two dozen.
Fact: all the rest are basically the same in terms of the program's reputation. A well-known university's name helps, but this does not prove that the MBA program is any good. It's just a degree.
My advice: get the MBA degree online as cheap as you can. A good choice: Ft. Smith State University in Kansas.
But this is only part of the story. There is also this question: Are any of your professors likely to move up or out?
The Asian woman could not get a job offer for a year and a half. There are lots of smart Asian women with MBA's where she lives. She applied in industry. The MBA got her some interviews, but not one job offer.
Then a month ago she got an offer to teach a one evening course in business at a local university. That's a foot in the door. A woman who had taught her got a job at the other university. It was an institutional step down, but a career step up. She now is in charge of hiring. She remembered the Asian graduate, who lives nearby.
Almost simultaneously, she got a second offer from the same university. Another woman who had taught her had just been hired by the university. She is in the administration. This woman has to re-structure certain aspects of the faculty's hierarchical system. I call this "pushing on barbed wire." This job will be her initiation. It's the job no sensible bureaucrat would take. It will take an effective sales campaign. She remembered that the Asian student was successful in getting students to co-operate on teams. She has hired her to offer part-time advice. It is clear to me that this will become full-time advice when the lack of co-operation by the faculty becomes systematic. I give this six months. It will last for years.
So, her degree counted institutionally, but only institutionally. It did not count in the free market. It was who she knew, not the degree, that got her the offers. She will have to prove that what she knows counts in the two environments. She will be smarter than the undergraduates. She will not be wiser in the ways of bureaucracy than the faculty is. She had better come up with ways to create plausible benefits for co-operation. This is a marketing job in a non-market environment.
I still recommend online degrees. But if you attend college live and in person, be helpful to any professors you have. Hope that they move up.
It's who you know and what proof you have of being a 120-IQ person.
Of course, what you know is crucial if you are self-employed. This is where the big money is. You don't take a large salary until it is crucial for passing IRS audits.
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