<p>interesting read, makes you question is it really worth it?</p>
<p>Well, as a Stanford MBA, I can assure you that a <em>Harvard</em> MBA is definitely not worth it. :p</p>
<p>I feel certain that the specific job opportunities I had in the years immediately following b-school would not have come my way but for the degree/recognition of the school. In that sense, it was worth it.</p>
<p>Whether it paid me back in pure monetary ROI terms, I can't say. But I didn't go for the highest paying (out of the gate) fields; that wasn't my purpose.</p>
<p>I also have found (now some 20+ years out) that some of the classes I took there have been invaluable in my career and in life. Not the ones you'd probably expect though. Most valuable to me, personally: Negotiation, Creativity in Business, Interpersonal Dynamics (what we called "Touchy-Feely" back then), Entrepreneurship.</p>
<p>Would someone be willing to copy/paste this article please?</p>
<p>Can legally paste a couple of quotes:</p>
<p>"Research varies on the value of an M.B.A. A 2006 study by the Lubin School of Business at Pace University, looking at 482 companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange, found that only 162 of them had chief executives with graduate degrees in business. The companies with chief executives who went to more prestigious schools did no better than those who went to less prestigious schools, according to the study. Why this was so is unclear."</p>
<p>"On the other hand, Professor Gottesman and a colleague found in a separate study, published earlier this year in the Journal of Empirical Finance, that mutual fund managers with M.B.A.'s from BusinessWeek's 30 top-ranked business schools including Harvard generally outperformed other mutual fund managers. Professor Gottesman is not sure why this was so, either."</p>
<p>According to the 2006 Global M.B.A. Graduate Survey from the Graduate Management Admission Council, 63 percent of M.B.A. alumni described the value of their degree as "outstanding or excellent," when comparing the cost of their degree to the quality of their educations; 29 percent called it "good."</p>
<p>"The real value of an Ivy League business degree is arguably not the education itself, but the screening of intelligence, drive and past accomplishments that the schools do," said Ben Dattner, founding principal of Dattner Consulting in New York.</p>
<p>"But others advocate hands-on experience over academic buffing and polishing. "M.B.A. programs train the wrong people in the wrong ways with the wrong consequences," said Henry Mintzberg, a management professor at McGill University in Montreal. "You can't create a manager in a classroom. If you give people who aren't managers the impression that you turned them into one, you've created hubris." </p>
<p>In 2003, Professor Mintzberg tracked the performance of 19 students who graduated from the Harvard Business School in 1990 and were at the top of their class academically. Ten of the 19 were "utter failures," he said. "Another four were very questionable, at least," he added. "So five out of 19 did well."</p>
<p>Didn't George Bush get his MBA from Harvard?</p>
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<p>Just use BugMeNot: <a href="http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.nytimes.com%5B/url%5D">http://www.bugmenot.com/view/www.nytimes.com</a></p>