I am vindicated! When I was in college, I held a low opinion of my fellow students who were in the MBA program. My college turned them out by the hundreds, but none of them, or at least very few of them, appeared to have the brains God gave a goose. I thought I must be wrong. It was impossible, I thought at the time, for an entire academic discipline to be made up of self-centered, shallow, greedy persons seeking an easy degree because they lacked the intellectual capacity to pursue something more rigorous, such as Administration of Justice. I was an undergraduate at the time, so I naturally regarded MBA students as “superior” to me because they were in post-baccalaureate status. That changed when I sat through a class called “Business Ethics,” which they were all required to take. None of them, without a single exception, could relate one abstract concept to another. Perhaps they had no love for ethics in the first place, but not a person among them could make a coherent analysis or argument. Because the class involved more than memorization and regurgitation, they were all at sea. I helped a number of them through the class, those who had the courtesy to avoid displaying open contempt for a non-business student, and they seemed to be catching on toward the end. That made me realize something significant. These were not stupid people. They weren’t born dim. Business school made them stupid! Somehow, perhaps in the process of cramming all that manure into their brains, the ability to think and reason had been pushed out. They were capable of thinking, but none of their business professors had any interest in that. A couple students related some of the horror stories of struggling through a BA in business and then going on to pursue an MBA. Here is a sample. They had one professor who demanded they come to class in what he deemed “business attire.” The first day of class, this esteemed academician reviewed each of his students, critiqued their slovenly appearance, and told them men must wear suits to his class and women must wear skirts or dresses. This went on for years, with the college defending its professor on the grounds of “academic freedom.” “But wait!” as they say in the TV info-mercial ads, “There’s more!” This man’s lectures consisted of leafing through the textbook, which he had written and demanded his students purchase, and asking if there were any questions. “Page 44, any questions?” “Page 45, any questions?” If someone were naïve enough to ask a question, the professor would then read the part of that page he felt answered the question. That was it. That was the entire pedagogic methodology of the man who made everybody wear business suits to his class. This went on for years, until one day the professor began criticizing the attire of a gentleman in his class who happened to be CEO of a successful tech company. After witnessing the professor ridiculing other students, and upon being informed his khakis and oxford shirt were unsuitable attire, this student responded in a manner someone else should have done long before. He told the professor, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I actually run a business, a fairly successful business, and the taxes I pay would just about fund your entire department. The generous donation I give to this university every year would certainly pay your salary. I’m here not just because I want a master’s degree, but also because I expect you to offer me some useful knowledge and instruction of the sort a reasonable person would expect at a university. If you prefer to spend your time pretending this is the third grade, where you tell the boys and girls how to dress, that’s fine. If you think that applies to me, however, any or all of the four attorneys who work for me will see a judge and produce a court order convincing you otherwise. I’m paying for a service here, namely academic instruction, and if you don’t deliver there’s going to be a pissing contest. You won’t like the outcome.” Believe it or not, the professor would not relent, thinking his PhD and tenure status would shield him from the consequences of his incompetence and arrogance. He was forced to retire before the academic term ended. I guess this kind of torture and brainwashing explain some of the defensive comments from people who know, deep down in their hearts, they’ve been cheated. They pursued a degree they thought would make them rich, and now that bubble has burst. What’s worse, they spent six or seven years in school learning how not to think. “truth” calls you a stinky turd and then continues to insult you in garbled English that reads like a note from a meth addict. I like that part about your useless degree. That’s why he is reading your article. Fortunately, Mr. “truth” is not the sole spokesperson for MBAs everywhere. Joe 3523 titles his post “poorly reasoned nonsense,” but redeems himself by making a cogent comment. “Economists and policy analysts collaborated to create a regulatory environment that allowed absurdly esoteric financial instruments to occupy an increasingly vital role in the overall world economy.” Joe commits the sin of which he accuses you, namely blaming a particular group of people for all the problems. Still, he has an excellent point, as long as we keep in mind the “policy analysts” of whom he speaks are nothing more than a cabal of reckless free-market ideologues who work at various supply-side think tanks around the country. They did not conceive of a particular set of regulations that landed us in this mess, but quite the opposite. They assiduously avoided regulations, and took the trouble to eliminate or relax dozens of them. The banks remained regulated, although perhaps inadequately so, while the “alternative instruments” went about their business with not even a sideways glance from the regulators. The real point of all this lies in the string of posts from bruuklin, Texas83, mr3rd, swabygw, etc. An education is what you make of it. Unfortunately, the MBA “thing” promises the education will make you a different person, a “master” of business, someone who can stride across the planet and make money and Run Things, by God! As some of the MBA posters themselves inform us, such a thing is not possible. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Sorry if I got that wrong, but I have not read Shakespeare in many years. As several of the comments point out, we are subservient to “the system” and it was not devised by MBAs. The system hired them as fast as colleges could produce them because many, many people were required to build and maintain all the “alternative instruments” that gobbled up our money and made it vanish into thin air. The system is a creation of people who want to make money, and it includes people of all sizes and shapes, MBAs as well as others. With the collapse of the system that employed all those MBAs, it is tempting to believe the MBA will become a cursed degree, but I doubt it. Look, the same thing happened to “software engineer” or whatever it’s called. Colleges turned them out by the truckload for several years. Some of them were good at math and little else. “Couldn’t think his way out of a paper bag.” Back in the day, they all got good jobs and made bundles of money. Now many of them are flipping burgers or parking cars. The whole thing got too big to sustain itself and everybody could see it had to burst sometime, but nobody knew how to respond ahead of time. People kept right on getting various IT engineering degrees, hoping reality would never come down on them. The MBA will shake out the same way. Far fewer people will pursue biz degrees in the next few years, because the system can’t absorb them all the way it did for a while. An MBA will be like a degree in Library Science, at least for a few years. I think that’s a good thing, because the discipline will be forced to concentrate on quality over quantity. Colleges will have to produce graduates who know how to think because there will be no jobs for those who can’t. Some colleges will have to drop their MBAs altogether. Maybe some of the rotten professors will even get dumped in the process.

My, my, my, what a stinky turd you are. You honestly believe that MBA students are at fault for the economic problems? Just because our intelligence to make money and leave your tree hugging ass in the woods bothers you doesn’t make us bad people. What’s next? Are you going to say the biochemists are trying to kill us with drugs that are later proved harmful? How about all cops being bad because a few beat a man senseless? What if I said all journalists were nothing more then propaganda spreading drones that follow the wishes of people above them. Oh, I bet that one struck a nerve. Why don’t you try and write an article that actually has some merit and maybe you can salvage some of your name and whatever useless degree you must have earned.

This article has two glaring omissions in its scorn of MBA's and the recent fallout of Wall Street.

First, it makes no mention of the human nature to exploit advantageous opportunities recklessly. We as a society on Main Street and Wall Street had bought into the notion of painless, riskless excess that was fueled by nothing but our own greed. MBA's on Wall Street were no different than the guy making $50,000 a year that bought a no-money down, interest-only ARM, $250,000 home, maxed out credit cards, and bought a $30,000 brand new car. It's also no different than the person that goes to a plastic surgeon and opts for liposuction when a change of diet and hard work would probably yield better, healthier and more lasting results. The only notion is that the MBA put these people into positions that allowed them to pursue this level of greed on a larger scale, not that the MBA made them any greater or lesser managers. An individual's will, scruples and intelligence do not necessarily have to correlate.

Secondly, it undermines those individuals who had no exposure to business prior. The article makes no mention of the career-changer. I was an R&D engineer prior to B-school. I didn't even know what a balance sheet was. But I knew long before B-school that it didn't make sense for people to buy cars and homes with no money down. I didn't understand how in a less than three decades, we went from individuals saving to buy homes and cars to people with hardly any verifiable income buying luxury homes and cars with no money down. This was the downfall of our society. MBA's in the proper positions exploited this legally. Again, playing to their human nature to exploit any advantage. The MBA degree in and of itself had very little to do with what our society is sliding into...

This article has two glaring omissions in its scorn of MBA's and the recent fallout of Wall Street.

First, it makes no mention of the human nature to exploit advantageous opportunities recklessly. We as a society on Main Street and Wall Street had bought into the notion of painless, riskless excess that was fueled by nothing but our own greed. MBA's on Wall Street were no different than the guy making $50,000 a year that bought a no-money down, interest-only ARM, $250,000 home, maxed out credit cards, and bought a $30,000 brand new car. It's also no different than the person that goes to a plastic surgeon and opts for liposuction when a change of diet and hard work would probably yield better, healthier and more lasting results. The only notion is that the MBA degree put these people into positions that allowed them to pursue this level of greed on a larger scale, not that the MBA made them any greater or lesser managers. An individual's will, scruples and intelligence do not necessarily have to correlate.

Secondly, it undermines those individuals who had no exposure to business prior. The article makes no mention of the career-changer. I was an R&D engineer prior to B-school. I didn't even know what a balance sheet was. But I knew long before B-school that it didn't make sense for people to buy cars and homes with no money down. I didn't understand how in less than three decades, we went from individuals saving to buy homes and cars to people with hardly any verifiable income buying luxury homes and cars with no money down. This was the downfall of our society. MBA's in the proper positions exploited this legally. Again, they were playing to their human nature to exploit any advantage. The MBA degree in and of itself had very little to do with what our society has slid into.