MT asked a batch of successful business leaders who have fulfilled many of their career ambitions whether the effort of getting their MBA qualifications had paid off. For most of them it had been tough (but fun), had boosted their confidence and put them on the fast track. It could do the same for you. Stefan Stern reports Are business schools worth the time or the money? Professor Meyer Feldberg, dean of Columbia Business School, New York City, has no doubts about the answer. (A forthright man: on his desk stands a sign marked ‘No whining’.) When Feldberg spoke a while ago at an RSA lecture in London he could not have been more bullish about the employability of the hungry young executives that his business school offers up to the world. Feldberg presented a portrait of a phenomenally intelligent and talented elite, in the ‘98th percentile of the world’ in terms of educational achievement, storming through two years of hyper-activity on the path to greatness, riches, and global dominance. Truly, the graduates of business schools will inherit the earth ‘Almost 60% of our students will end up working for the investment banks,’ Feldberg revealed. ‘In Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley we have around 250 Columbia alumni in each of those firms. Of the top 15 people at Morgan Stanley, seven are our alumni. It sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.’ Columbia’s savvy graduates know exactly what their two years at business school are all about, and demand value for money. ‘The overall cost of doing an MBA degree at Columbia, Harvard, Stanford, MIT or Chicago is close to $200,000,’ Feldberg explained. This figure includes fees, the opportunity cost of two years’ salary, and living expenses. ‘That turns out to give the students a certain amount of clout. They are now customers as well as students.’ qr code advertising . online best dissertation service abstracts international All of which confirms that the investment of one or two years in a high-quality Master of Business Administration course is a serious business proposition. Leo Murray, director of Cranfield School of Management, agrees. ‘The MBA is a very big investment of time, cash, emotions,’ he says. ‘You should treat it like a business project, evaluating it fully in advance. It makes great demands on you and your partner. You can’t do an MBA on a wing and a prayer. The moral remains: caveat emptor.’ MBAs are a branded, big-ticket, fast-moving consumer good, ‘one of the most successful marketing stories of the post-war years’, as Cranfield’s Murray puts it. In the US, business schools and the ‘science’ of management have been around for over a century – the first was founded by Joseph Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania in 1881. Through the 1960s and ’70s, there were far more Europeans studying for MBAs in the States than in Europe. It was not until 1979, after a critical report from Charles Handy on management education, that the British government allowed any university to develop its own MBA programme.

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