Post-MBA: A Job or Another Degree?

5) A Ph.D. is a valuable asset in the business world, especially in Europe. If one looks at the C-suite executives and boards of companies across Western Europe, most conspicuously in Germany, a staggering proportion of senior executives hold Ph.D.’s. Simply being “Doctor So-and-So” is a terrible reason to earn a Ph.D., but weighing the Ph.D. as both an academic achievement and a business credential is a worthwhile piece of life-planning arithmetic. The trend in Asia is increasingly to follow the European model in this regard, particularly in China.

The decision to pursue further education is a weighty one and should be viewed in the context of personal growth, not as a calculation of the net present value of a marginal improvement in future earnings. The latter calculation is suspect in both its accuracy and its relevance, as much of the utility one derives from graduate study comes in a relatively pure form of happiness – it is having complete confidence in a split-second calculation, having a few friends in Geneva to meet you for dinner when you land, or knowing someone running a fund in Nairobi when you need to learn the landscape quickly. This “social utility” of education, which is misunderstood as “networking” in much of the MBA ranking chatter, is one of the most rewarding aspects of studying at top institutions. The value of time spent in a space with the highest-caliber people cannot be underestimated, and both top firms in the private sector and top institutions of graduate study offer this experience. Whether you stay in school after the MBA to do it, working with the best people is an experience everyone should have – or aspire to have – and I feel incredibly fortunate to have had this experience on both sides of the Atlantic early in my career.

Karl T. Muth is an M.Phil./Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science and maintains a consulting practice focusing on economic analysis and applied finance in Europe and Africa. He holds law and business degrees, the latter with a concentration in economics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where he serves on the Admissions Committee. All opinions and comments in this piece represent Mr. Muth’s views and do not reflect the views of any institution with which he is affiliated.

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