My Millennial MBA: A Retrospective
Less than a week ago, I finished my last class for my part-time MBA at George Washington University in downtown Washington, D.C. Over the past two and a half years, I averaged 2 nights per week on campus and about 10 hours per week on homework, group meetings, papers, and reading.
Was it worth it for me? Is it worth it for you?
We’ll get to that in a minute!
Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a deluge of MBA-bashing posts on Medium. Here is just a small sample of the more popular pieces:
“Most elite business schools teach directionally wrong advice.”
“An MBA took me further away from pursuing a hard learn[ed] skill, a skill that feels real, a skill where there is no finish line, a skill that in later years gives meaning beyond career building.”
“MBAs may no longer make sense financially” and “MBAs don’t represent the networking option they once were.”
Bleak!
I certainly enjoyed many aspects of these posts and definitely agreed with some of their major points: The traditional MBA is being disrupted and is no longer the guaranteed path to achieve your next career goal. The MBA will help you achieve some goals, but it actually may slow you down on achieving others.
Quick Example: If you’re interested in creating an Artificial Intelligence company or an Autonomous transportation startup, you’d be much better served by real world work experience and exposure.
Even if you weren’t ready to leave the classroom completely, there are incredible opportunities to learn cheaply (or for free!) online about these growing industries. For AI specifically, check out Udacity or edX if you want to learn more: Udacity AI Degree and edX AI (P.S. I already enrolled).
So let’s break the Masters of Business Administration down and help you reach an answer for yourself: Is this degree worth it?
TL;DR Benefits and Costs
MBA Benefits
- Exposure to the breadth of the business world
- Expand knowledge of other industries/careers
- Become a master of time management
- Learn how to think again
- Build companies and connections that matter
MBA Costs
- Not a guaranteed path to your goals
- Huge financial and opportunity costs
- You won’t learn too many hard skills
How a MBA Will Help You (and how it helped me)
1. Exposure to the Massive Breadth of Business: From Accounting to Finance to Marketing to Entrepreneurship, the field of “business” is enormous. The MBA’s first selling point is its exposure (although light) to many aspects of how businesses work.
An MBA will provide you enough instruction to understand the difference between capital ratios and mark-to-market accounting. You’ll become knowledgeable in many disciplines of business, but not necessarily dangerous in any (unless you push beyond the bounds of the curriculum).
2. Expand Your Knowledge of Other Industries and Careers: In your professional career, it’s easy to remain hyper-focused on your industry alone. A MBA will make you think about other industries that you may never have considered before. In my MBA, I found myself thinking about Healthcare, Consulting, and the Federal Government much, much more than I ever would have on my own.
Even more impactful, though, was working with the rising leaders in each of these industries. Through conversations with my peers, I could see the changes coming to their fields in the future as our generation began to exert more influence.
3. Become a Time Management Master: I had it easy. I have no kids, lived a reasonable distance away from school on the metro (~30–45 minutes), and have a very understanding wife. But even considering this, a night-time or part-time MBA will make you into a time management master. When two of your weekdays start at 6am and end at 10pm, you’ll find yourself pushed to your limit. You’ll also find yourself eating a LOT of caffeine gum (or maybe that was just me?)
You’ll learn to be a prioritization machine, some days using your class time to catch up on work and others, the opposite. The job you have now makes a big difference here. If you’re at a large corporation, it’s probably going to be a lot easier to manage this balance than if you’re at a small startup. For me, my MBA was much easier to manage at Vistaprint than it was at Upside (a D.C. startup).
4. Learn How to Think Again: Remember in college when you just had time to think? Even though you’ll be pushed to your time limits (see #3), you’ll find that a MBA brings you back to a place when you can think more deeply.
In most careers, the fire drills and delivery deadlines dominate, but in most MBA programs, you’ll be challenged to think about things like: how to start and finance a virtual reality arcade, how to grow a mid-sized healthcare company to be an industry leader, and how to turn-around a failing defense contractor.
Trying to improve your thinking without committing to an MBA? Check out my post on how we can bring back time for thinking!
5. Build Things That You Care About: Don’t tell my professors, but in my time on campus during the first year of my MBA, I managed to write and publish my first book, Building Digital Products.
Although my book was completely outside of the scope of my MBA coursework, an MBA provides you countless opportunities to start companies or non-profits you care about.
Startup pitch competitions, surplus engineering and business talent/enthusiasm, and abundant creativity from a younger generation (undergrads) all provide an incredible and incubative environment for you to build the next big thing.
Don’t get bogged down by the day-to-day class work, focus more on what you achieve outside of class!
How an MBA Won’t Help You
1. Lock Down a “Next Level” Position in the Career of Your Dreams: In almost all industries, an MBA is a strong credential to have. It’s a powerful signal that you care about continuing your learning and bettering yourself. However, it is no longer a guarantee of what I call a “next level” position in the career of your dreams.
If you’re looking to change careers, for example, moving from Finance to Consulting, an MBA will help facilitate that move by buying you enough credibility for the interview, but it won’t get you to partner any faster. In today’s world, a consultant with only an undergraduate degree who proves him or herself day in and day out may rise faster.
The MBA will be your key to the door, but how much did you pay for that key? Let’s get to cost.
2. Opportunity Cost
When I was considering my MBA close to 3 years ago, cost was a major concern. And I was just thinking about the tangible dollar cost of the credit hours…
Let’s break down the true costs of an MBA, using GW’s current tuition rates.
The Cost of a Full-Time GW MBA
Tuition: 55.5 credits @ $1,765 = $98k
Room + Board: 2 years @ $1,500/month = $36k
Missed Salary = $100k * 2 years = $200k
Total Cost of Full-Time MBA: $334k
The Cost of a Part-Time GW MBA
Tuition: 55.5 credits @ $1,765 = $98k
Missed Opportunities: Incredibly difficult to value, but what did you miss while you are in your MBA classes? In my case, it was DC Tech Meetup events and other opportunities to build my tech network in D.C.
Total Cost of Part-Time MBA: $98k + ?
$334k! Even if you can make a 25% higher salary with your new and shiny MBA, it would take close to 14 years (!) to pay back the cost of a full-time MBA. For me the choice was simple, a part-time MBA was the way to go, but as you can see, it still wasn’t cheap.
Had I not received support from both GW and my employer to cover much of the cost of my degree, my choice to pursue an MBA may have been different.
3. Learning Hard Skills: In my undergraduate years at Michigan, I was in the Ross School of Business. Because of this early exposure to business, I can’t say that I learned many new “hard” skills in my MBA. I already understood double-entry accounting, discounted cash flows, and how to break down a business case.
However, even if I hadn’t studied business in my undergrad, I believe that the hard skills learned in an MBA are only somewhat valuable. While they provide exposure to the different aspects of business (see benefit #1), what is taught will often lag what’s happening in the private sector by 3–5 years.
The typical MBA program isn’t on the cutting edge as it takes a long time to build a curriculum and find experts from a new field (i.e. AI or VR) to teach.
So Should You Forget the MBA?
Think about your career goals. Will you be helped by the benefits I’ve mentioned above or hurt by both the intangible and very, very tangible costs?
Knowing what I know now, if I could go back 3 years in time and choose again, I would still decide to get my MBA at GW. But, it does feel good to be done!
If you’d like to talk about your personal goals and hear more about my experience with my MBA, reach out to me on Twitter! I’d be happy to help you make your decision.
More from Alex Mitchell
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this post, I think you would enjoy my new book Disrupting Yourself.
I’m offering a very limited time Medium discount on the Kindle version here: Disrupting Yourself Special Offer (if you prefer paperback: Disrupting Yourself Paperback)
And if you’re looking to learn more about Product Management or become a better Product Manager, I would pick up a copy of my book: Building Digital Products (New 2nd Edition!)
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are affiliate links, meaning that at no additional cost to you, I earn a commission if you click them and purchase a product.
