1. You’re NOT Going to Make More Money
These days, everyone has an MBA; they’re, as the saying goes, a dime a dozen. In other words, when they first came out, not everyone had one. Now, the degree is so copied, so common place, that having one isn’t anything special. If your goal is to differentiate yourself from your peers, the MBA is hardly the way to do it these days. It’s become quite diluted, and only a very, very small percentage of MBA grads come out making anywhere near the imagined six figures they think they’ll get. Some HR managers may even see you as being “overqualified” if you change jobs or look to do a career pivot.
2. Programs are Notoriously Impractical
Contrary to popular belief, MBA programs don’t really offer a lot of “practical” advice. In fact, you tend to spend your time reading case studies and books written by academics who have minimal real world experience actually making money. That’s not to say that there aren’t exceptions to the rule, but quite often, the people actually teaching the classes have made average incomes, lived average lives, and seldom done anything worthy of emulation in the business world beyond earning an MBA or doctorate themselves. That doesn’t make them bad people, just not the people I want to learn from. If that’s your actual goal, to be like them, then go for it. But if you want more, then take this seriously. There’s an old joke in academia that goes something like this: PhDs know lots and lots about less and less.
Which leads me to the next point…
3. Most Entrepreneurs Do NOT Have an MBA
I enjoy earning an exceptional income, not an average one. Anyone can be an employee; you can put your head down and work a job. There’s nothing wrong with that. But having an MBA doesn’t ensure you’ll get or always have a job; it’s just a degree. Nobody in life, to be frankly, is guaranteed anything. But more importantly, look around the business world and ask this question, “How many billionaires earned their MBA?” The answer will likely shock you.
When I look at people I’d like to emulate, very few (if any) ever went to business school. An MBA isn’t like going to a trade school where you learn actual skills; there’s no set standard that will help you become a better businessman. Most of the people I respect in business (Bill Gates, Richard Branson, et cetra) all learned through trial and error; they got up every day, worked hard, stayed focused, and moved forward. Ever day. Day in, day out.
I might add that Richard Branson doesn’t have a university degree, let alone an MBA. Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard as an undergraduate and co-founded Microsoft. If I could be like them, and I knew what I know now, I can honestly say I’d not have spent the time and money on the MBA, but would have invested that time and money on other ventures.
4. Earning an MBA is a Major Waste of Time
Listen, most MBA programs will take two years of your life you can’t ever get back. Some will take a year full time, and if you’re really killing yourself like I did—10 months (including a 38,000+ word dissertation). Even though I worked faster and was able to graduate much earlier than my contemporaries, it was still a major waste of my time. That’s partly why I worked so hard to get it over with.
I figured out by the first semester that what I was being asked to learn wasn’t remotely relevant to what I wanted to accomplish in business. I’m an entrepreneur, and I never had any interest in sitting in a box working towards someone else’s goals. Ultimately, you have to decide what works for you; each of us has our future in our own hands, and we each have directions we want to go.
So you really have to ask yourself if spending 2-years and a ton of money is really going to produce a return on investment (ROI) for you. If I’m honest, I can’t say I got as much out of it as I would have liked.
5. An MBA isn’t Specialized Enough
These days the MBA is far too broad. Even the ones that are supposedly specialized, like those designed for marketing or other fields, really aren’t focused enough. As I noted earlier, they’re also often very outdated. It’s like earning a degree in computing and taking COBOL for an entire semester in 2015. What? If you’re doing a degree in computers or programming, you should be focused on what’s being used, today, right now. Java, PHP, HTML, CSS, C+, and other languages that people are activly using right now to create applications, programs, Likewise, many of the programs out there are being taught by people who have very minimal information creating solutions in given areas for today’s problems. If you take a marketing class and it doesn’t teach you how to do split tests, then you’re already behind the power curve.
