We were sent this infographic recently from Tony Shin and his design team. The infographic is intended to “to help create discussion about the value and worth of an MBA and how sometimes people are misconstrued by this notion that if you don’t get more schooling, you won’t succeed. This infographic merely sheds light on the subject by showing other successful examples that didn’t need to get more schooling to succeed.” Says Shin.
Personally I have considered doing an MBA before. It seemed to be a natural path to continue on, during my consulting days. But then I wanted to get more into entrepreneurship and start-ups and figured there could be no substitute for doing entrepreneurship. However I have some very good friends who are extremely smart and have or are doing their MBA’s at the best schools in the world, like Stanford, Wharton, Harvard and Insead and believe they have gotten enormous value from doing their MBA. It really depends on the individual if it is worth it.
The infographic shows that average salaries after an MBA are remaining stagnant while tuition fees are climbing meaning it become harder for students to pay off student loans and note that 1/5 MBA graduates default on their loans.
More interestingly they looked at some of the most successful business people without an MBA like Warren Buffet, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates. And only one US President, George W. Bush has an MBA and look how he turned out. The point being that an MBA does not guarantee business success. But of course these people are the exceptions.
The ending argument, encourages entrepreneurs to spend their money building a company rather than sitting in class learning about it.
Check out the rest of the statistics and insights below.
Created by: MBAOnline.com
I read a similar post on
http://www.b-school.com/is-a-great-business-school-a-good-entrepreneurship-school/
Well, numbers are great. However, I wouldn’t be too caught up in numbers. Some of the greatest entrepreneurs, i.e. Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, do not even have a college degree. In addition, some of the smartest programmers do not even have a Computer Science degree. For example, Kevin Systrom from Instagram. God forbid if someone argues we shouldn’t send kids to college or don’t study CS.
In addition, some numbers are pretty meaningless without context. For example, author argues 1/4000 top-10 MBAs raises to C-level. This number seems insignificantly small until you ask what’s a major that has higher % to produce C-level than MBAs? I bet there is none.
It depends if you are on the course to learn or to obtain the qualification. This has to be the question that people considering this ask themselves.
To answer this, you first need to know the objective after the course. Is it t work for a corporate or is it to start a business?
If it is a corporate then a qualification in the administration of business seems useful. If the intention is entrepreunerial, then there seems little value in a qualification on ‘administration’.