You don’t need an MBA (it needs you)

I had an engineering professor who liked to tell tall tales. His great-aunt the Indian freedom fighter. Partying with U2 in Dublin. Playing in the Indian equivalent of the Beatles. Top secret consulting for NASA. Building an electric guitar in a slum as a child – without prior knowledge of its existence. We didn’t believe any of it.

One day, in a coherent moment between ramblings, he told us his latest thesis – that the economy of our small Canadian province was entirely dependent on our lone university. He argued that the average university graduate’s salary was X% higher than the average high school graduate’s salary. And that X% accounted for $Y in income tax revenue. Without those $Y, the provincial government would immediately go broke. Therefore the province needed our university.

And we believed it. Hard not to, really. We were keeping the provincial economy afloat. It was good for our egos. And it seems perfectly logical.

Maybe we really were keeping the economy afloat, but our professor hadn’t proved it – he was (and we were) confusing cause and correlation.

The same argument is often made for business school. They’ll say: ”Look at how much MBA grads earn!”. But does business school teach you what’s needed to earn more than you would otherwise? Or is it just a place where people who are already smart and talented often choose to hang out for two years?

More likely the latter. It comes down to this: Smart people will earn more than others. And smart people (for now) tend to go to business school. Therefore business school grads earn more than non-grads. That’s it.

So if you’re good enough to get in, you don’t need to go. There are already some good alternatives – people like Josh Kaufman and Seth Godin are leading the way.