An MBA Trashes The Degree’s Value

Mariana Zanetti, author of The MBA Bubble

Zanetti says she harbored these doubts and concerns about the degree, especially after being unemployed for a year after graduation. But she largely kept them to herself until leaving the corporate world a little more than a year ago. “I always wanted to have my own business and to teach,” she adds. “I didn’t intend to write this book.”

Then, she knocked out an article published in France about her ideas. The opinion piece seemed to resonate with a lot of people so she wrote The MBA Bubble, which will be published in France next year and was self-published in English this week. She has built a nice-looking website to promote the book, though for some odd reason she does not openly identify herself as an IE MBA.  “My school is not a secret,” says Zanetti, who lists her diploma on her LinkedIn profile.

Her primary arguments against the degree? It is oversold by the business schools with slick marketing campaigns. Most people enter MBA programs without really understanding the limits of the degree. The education costs too much and delivers too little value. And often times graduates are saddled with so much debt that it limits their ability to follow their true passions. They take jobs they don’t want simply to pay off their student loans. Even the value of the network a graduate acquires with the degree is exaggerated and hardly worth it.

 ‘GET OUF OF HERE YOU SCUM!’

She’s unimpressed, if downright skeptical of data that shows MBAs get average increases over their pre-MBA base salaries of between 120% to 46% (see The MBA Bump: How Much To Expect?). And those averages are for all business schools, not just the prestige brand name places. Zanetti is also skeptical of surveys that show widespread satisfaction with the degree. One recent survey, based on the opinions of 4,135 MBA alumni, including 963 members of the Class of 2011, found that three out of four alumni of the class of 2011 with jobs reported that they could not have obtained their job without their graduate management education.

“Everybody is doing it and everybody still goes,” Zanetti sighs. “They take for granted that it is a good investment. Business schools manipulate the statistics and they are doing (unethical) things to market the degree. In France, one school hired a company to make fake (positive) comments in Internet forums. These schools have this university halo around them and talk about the labor market as if they are impartial but they are not. They are favoring their businesses. They continue selling things that do not have value because it has profit.”

Oftentimes, she says, her experience at IE was less than satisfying. “Business schools don’t treat you as a customer,” she says. “Applicants should not forget that they are customers and are buying something. We were even insulted. One day we were in a meeting room and the professional career director said to us, ‘Get out of here you scum.’ It was funny to him. I told him, ‘What’s so funny? I am paying your salary. I didn’t find it funny.”

‘YOU REALLY HAVE TO FIGHT TO CHANGE INDUSTRIES’

She says that IE’s director of career management also told students it was really hard to change industries with an MBA. “Yet they use it as a marketing claim,” she points out. But it is really not true. You really have to fight to change industries.  I did change industry but in the same job function.”

Zanetti estimates that she uses no more than 20% to 30% of what she learned in her one-year MBA program. As for networking, she shrugs. “You spend time with great people, but you can spend time with great people in many places, It is not unique. The network is really overrated because you meet wonderful people everywhere. It’s just one way to meet people. You can build your own brand in less time than it would take to pay back your loans.”

DON’T MISS: THE MBA BUMP: HOW MUCH TO EXPECT? or MBA STILL WORTH IT? ABSOLUTELY, SAY ALUMS