Billionaires Say That MBAs Are Worthless — Here’s What We Need To Know.

Many people are looking to obtaining their master of business administration (MBA) degrees as a way to boost their résumés in the hope of landing a better paying job after graduation. Investopedia has this to say about an MBA degree:

A master of business administration (MBA) is a graduate degree that provides theoretical and practical training for business or investment management. An MBA is designed to help graduates gain a better understanding of general business management functions.

The thing is that MBA degrees don’t come cheap. As it is said,

The cost of an MBA degree can vary, but the average tuition for a two-year MBA program exceeds $60,000. If you attend one of the top business schools, you can expect to pay as much as $100,000 or more in tuition and fees.

An MBA is often seen as an investment in your future, so it’s no surprise students shell out tens of thousands for the privilege.

But then we see how much financial destruction the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked. According to Forbes:

MBA job placement rates are down since the pandemic started. What’s most alarming: the decline in MBA jobs (34%) has been steeper than the decline in overall jobs (27%), for the period between May 2019 and May 2020.

Drowning in debt, recent MBA classes have struggled. Of the 2020 MBA grads who’d already accepted a full-time gig pre-pandemic, around half had thttps://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/mba-student-debtheir start date delayed or completely rescinded.

If one is “investing” that much in their future, why is this “investment” failing so miserably?

Even the billionaire club says MBAs are kinda useless.

Peter Thiel, for instance, says that MBAs squash “real innovation and individuality”.

Jack Ma (prior to his run-in with the Chinese govvernment) had this to say about MBAs:

It is not necessary to study an MBA. Most MBA graduates are not useful… Unless they come back from their MBA studies and forget what they’ve learned at school, then they will be useful. Because schools teach knowledge while starting businesses requires wisdom. Wisdom is acquired through experience. Knowledge can be acquired through hard work.

The fundamental issue with a formal MBA education is that it is incongruous with how the real world functions in terms of making money.

Bryan Caplan’s book, The Case Against Education, argues that the primary function of education is to condition people into becoming good employees — which is congruous to Peter Thiel’s statement about squashing innovation and individuality.

Because to be a good employee, one must conform to the system. They can’t be doing their own thing (beyond the boundaries of their autonomy), or the system will weed them out. Much like how a healthy immune system is able to weed out malignant mutated cells in our body before they aggregate into a tumour mass.

And we know what happens to good employees — they get discarded from the payroll if the company is financially hurting from the pandemic.

To be a billionaire, one doesn’t necessarily need an MBA.

Even Jack Ma wants his MBA hires to forget what they learnt at school.

Building a startup requires wisdom, he says.

And that wisdom sometimes will border on the unethical.

As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez puts it,

Billionaires make their money “off the backs” of undocumented immigrants, minorities, and single mothers who are all “literally dying because they can’t afford to live.

No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars.

To be a billionaire, one has to toe the fine line between unethical and ethical, lawful and criminal.

For years, Nike was accused of running sweatshops in developing nations to create the high-priced products that were being marketed to the developed nations.

An MBA teaches one to be ethical and lawful.

It will never ever teach one about the unethical and criminal side of taking a billion dollars — otherwise, how would the renowned business schools around the world maintain their squeaky clean exterior image?

Imagine how Harvard’s reputation would go down the drain if they condoned or taught unethical behaviour in their MBA classes — as such, their new graduates will always come out being ethical humans, until they acquire sufficient wisdom to toe the fine line. And some will get caught for conducting criminal operations.

But as a result, many MBA graduates tend to finish their MBA with a nice degree and a ton of student debt…

While failing to secure some form of sufficient remuneration to pay off that debt.

It’s terribly mystifying, indeed.

But what we can learn out of all this is that a formal education isn’t a necessary precursor to becoming a billionaire.

It’s the ability to take that matters.

This article was originally published in Medium.

Joel Yong, Ph.D., is a biochemical engineer/scientist, an educator, and a writer. He has authored 5 ebooks (available on Amazon.com) and co-authored 6 journal articles in internationally peer-reviewed scientific journals. His main focus is on finding out the fundamentals of biochemical mechanisms in the body that the doctors don’t educate the lay people about and will then deconstruct them for your understanding — as an educator should.