Optima & Outliers
In 2018, my boss gave me 17 reasons why business school was a bad idea and convinced me to stay. I accepted.. but only to find myself on a flight to Boston two years later. This isn't a story about my boss being wrong – most of his criticisms were spot on. Rather, it’s illustrative of the fact that the value of an MBA is fairly context dependent. That's the problem with most business school takes out there: they reek of confirmation bias or rest on assumptions that don’t generalize. So I'll try to do better than that here by offering a general framework that you can use even if my personal story isn’t very illuminating to you (it probably isn’t).
For some – particularly wealthy professionals exhausted after years in investment banking or private equity – business school serves as a socially acceptable break. It's a way to recharge without the stigma of a resume gap. I have nothing interesting to say here.
But most of us aren't thinking this way. We're thinking about the MBA as an asset – an expensive, intangible one – and trying to figure out if it'll pay off. But here's where people mess up: they do some quick math dividing MBA cost by the median post-grad salary and call it a day. That's dumb for two reasons:
