Posted 5:41 AM by Blah blah

Furor over MBA study by Stanford researchers: Stanford study contends MBA degrees overrated (San Francisco Chronicle).

What's an MBA Really Worth? (Business 2.0):
_________________
It will cost more than $100,000 to earn a degree at an elite business school. Just one problem: There's little real evidence that it will enhance your career....

The drive for academic respectability, however, has nurtured a teaching culture in which few marketing professors have managed a brand, few management professors have led a team, and few finance professors have done a deal. "You had faculty from social science disciplines like economics and sociology replacing real-world practitioners in classrooms," says James Bailey, an associate professor at George Washington University's business school. "Aside from Harvard and [the University of Virginia's] Darden, which stayed with the case method, business schools began telling students, 'Here's the concept, you figure out how to apply it.'" The result is a mismatch between what students are being taught and what they need to know to succeed in business....

The AACSB based its findings on a survey of 1,500 graduates of 18 full-time MBA programs, who were asked which skills were most important in their careers, and to what extent their degrees enhanced those skills. The graduates rated one-on-one communication as most important, yet they considered only 6 percent of business schools better than "moderately effective" in helping students develop in that area. Alumni also rated listening skills and managing change as "extremely important" for career success, but gave only 12 and 6 percent of schools, respectively, high marks at teaching them. No school rated above "moderately effective" in teaching students to apply business theory in practice. In fact, alumni seemed to be saying that theory wasn't all that useful anyway, ranking it second-to-last in importance.