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The vast majority of people I know with an MBA learned exactly one skill, which is applied to everything: How to bullshit in a noncommittal way through things you don't know, by using terms and acronyms for commonplace ideas that only other MBA people know and cherry-picked data.

FWIW, this was not my experience with business school. Possibly applied to the people who wanted to go into finance, but I avoided most of those dudes.

I've never been to any of the classes, for sure. I can only speak to what it seems to have taught people by all the MBA-requiring-positions in my life, ever.

you should see what the median blueskeeter says about economists

As an undergraduate science major, an MBA (after 6 years of work)taught me quite a bit about finance, accounting, organizational design and behavior. They were helpful to me and contrition be helpful running startups and now as an investor. MBA is definitely not the only way to acquire knowledge.

I’ve an MBA, and taught graduate level business courses for several years. Some of the best courses I took were organizational behavior, small group behavior, and leadership. It’s reinforced to me the extent to which so very many execs (and deans) don’t follow practices aligned w/ research.

So many of the things I dislike about corporate behavior we knew were incorrect 50 years ago, but we still keep doing them. Some myths (per research) - cubicles increase productivity - formal contracts >> relationship-based agreements - stack ranking employees works - $$ is best incentive

OMG don't get me started on cubicles. And open offices! If they were so great, top executive would clamor to have them for themselvrs. So they too could have so much spontaneous innovation.

Though, the value I did get came in two other forms: (1) there were some very smart people who were classmates but more importantly (2) I learned a lot from 2 professors who didn't teach traditional MBA stuff and many of my classmates hated their classes, because they didn't teach usual MBA stuff.

Amusingly, one of those classes was literally called "Management Consulting" and so much of the school took it because so many wanted to go into mgmt consulting, and it was really just a class for the prof to indoctrinate us in his personal theories about technology innovation.

And most of the class kept whining "wtf does this have to do with mgmt consulting." But that professor's influence over my views of how tech & innovation works remains to this day (mostly because he was right). He was an old school economist, but in the 90s became obsessed with how Bill Gates was...