<p>Help me to understand, please. I am a current adult grad-student pursuing my MBA at a Chicago-area (non-tier 1) University. I also have two college-age children that are pursuing their undergraduate studies and will also follow my footsteps and complete their MBA’s at similar non-tier 1 schools. I recently had dinner with someone who obtained their undergraduate degree at a tier-3 school, but also obtained their CPA designation as well (no graduate degree). Their comments/observations were that in today’s banking/professional environment, any MBA from a non-tier 1 school is “worthless.” In their opinion, any MBA’s received from anything other than a school like Wharton, Kellogg, Harvard, etc. wasn’t worth the paper it was written on. The only thing recognized these days were a top-tier MBA and/or a CPA!</p>
<p>Obviously, obtaining an MBA from a tier 1 school is going to hold more value than from a non-tier 1 school…but is anything other than a non tier 1 school truly looked upon as worthless?</p>
<p>I would appreciate any advice and published information I might be able to review to refute these comments. You should also know I personally think the comments are ridiculous, bigoted and mean-spirited - and I’m evaluating whether or not theres “value” in continuing a friendship with someone so narrow minded. In the meantime, it would help to have others perspectives - to further ensure it’s not me who’s being myopic.</p>
<p>Nonbusiness person here. I’ll bet 90+% of the jobs are and will be held by lower tier MBAs. There is a lot of life outside of the top tier. Someone has to be running the mundane corporate business everywhere. So what if XYZ firm in NYC/Chicago won’t hire you? Reminds me of a mother who said her D wouldn’t go to law school unless she got into a top ten one. Governors get law degrees from public flagships… Worth is in the eye of the beholder, that “friend” needs to consider all of the work needed in the country that is beneath his notice.</p>
<p>To be gracious here I think there might be some truthiness in the statement that includes “in today’s banking/professional environment.”</p>
<p>The truthy part is that in the midst of the biggest financial services meltdown in the last 80 years its’ a real tough environment for bankers and the like. Two observations about that:</p>
<p>1) Well, DUH . . . nothnig like noticing the glaringly obvious! It is a BUST cycle for financial services right now, so its;p harder to get noticed for jobs, and I hear that Big Name schools help get noticed some. </p>
<p>2) One gains education for life, for the long term, not for right now. The “environment” will be different in 5 years, 10 years and so on. The markets will change; after the turnaround and during the next financial; boom cycle people will be clamoring for well trained financial services people of many stripes.</p>
<p>Anecdotal rebuttal: a friend who is in Big Business - VERY successful owner of multiple corporations and so on - said that his group is ALWAYS looking for good people who have a track record of success wherever they were; he says that DRIVE and WILLINGNESS TO LEARN are the best predictors of success. This guy is financially more successful than almost everyone in the world, and went to a second tier LAC in the midwest and a second tier MBA in the east.</p>
<p>There also might be data out there about backgrounds of successful CEOs, etc.</p>
<p>I have an MBA from non-top tier 1 school. It’s been my personal experience that the MBA will help you get your foot in the door, it qualifys you on paper and then it’s all up to you. Regardless of where your degree is from. The degree only gets you in the door, a strong work ethic gets you where you want to be.</p>
<p>In my honest opinion, an MBA from a non-top tier 1 school is better than no graduate degree in today’s economic climate. When I was in grad school, I was the youngest in my class. Having an MBA set me apart in a stack of applications where many held only an undergraduate degree. Going to grad school is even more common now, meaning that more people hold graduate degrees – I’ve heard people in recruiting say that a graduate degree is fast becoming the new undergrad degree, it’s expected.</p>
<p>I have a client whose employees have the potential of making a lot of money. A lot. But my client forces his folks to get an MBA. They attend one of the “business and professional” MBA programs at a local university (the kind where you go on weekends). He’ll hire them without an MBA, but he thinks it’s important that they have one, even if its from a non-ranked local institution.</p>
<p>That’s a real life story of a real life very rich guy who thinks MBAs are important no matter what the institution.</p>
<p>What is incredibly cynical about that statement is that it ignores the fact that one might actually LEARN something while getting the MBA that might make one valuable to an employer. If this degree doesn’t net me $$$, then it wasn’t worth getting.</p>
<p>The only way you can “refute” this point is by accomplishing what you planned to accomplish with it. Depending on how realistic that was, it will either be worthless or not.</p>
<p>Statement is only true for banking and top-tier consulting jobs. There are great tier-2 MBA schools like Cornell, UCLA, Cal, Virginia - those graduates are getting very good jobs, typically more in corporate management than Wall St., but those are perfectly fine and provide excellent prospects to rise.</p>
<p>What Crescent says is very true for the biotech/tech industries. There are hardly any top tier MBAs grads running tech companies in my neck of the woods, but there are plenty of local industry veterans who rose to the top ranks without a business degree and later got their MBAs through the evening MBA program at our local flagship.</p>
<p>I got my degrees (JD/MBA) in a joint program a long time ago, so that of necessity colors my opinion - for good and bad. When I got an MBA it was not as popular as it is now, and many fewer women were in the programs. The fact that I had a joint degree always made my resume stand out a bit. I worked in corporate law in my first career. That said, the school I went to, had a program that did not generally place people in jobs on Wall St. as investment bankers at that time. It was a national university but in a different geographic area, and was a somewhat unknown quantity. People got good jobs in fortune 500 and fortune 100 and even fortune 50 companies. The large local employers hired people for summer internships and full time jobs. I really did not go there because of its ranking, but for the ability to take a joint degree. It is my understanding that the large mergers and acquisitions firm I worked at had never hired a law grad from my law school before I was hired, which was over 20 years ago. They sent me to recruit other attorneys from this school after I had been there for a couple of years, which was the first on campus recruiting that they had ever done.</p>
<p>As it turned out, this university improved its rankings for law and business over the years, and now probably places many more of its MBA graduates in jobs in investment banking - except that currently all MBAs will be facing a tougher job climate. In the NYC area, Baruch, a CUNY school has an MBA program and a lot of people get degrees there, and I think it helped them get jobs. In Atlanta, when I was there, the MBA program at Georgia State (which I think is now not in tier 1) had students and graduates at positions in the large Atlanta companies that hired MBAs (the same ones that also hired from the national university). I think that Morgan Stanley (btw are they still in business) would not hire a grad of Georgia State, but Coca Cola would. Substitute any number of other Wall St. firms in that sentence. </p>
<p>I always thought that getting a CPA was not for the meek of heart. I took quite a few accounting courses in business school, and I gave up on that idea (and I am a bean counter/math type). I would think that passing the CPA exam, even with a “lesser ranked” degree would be very useful in getting a job in accounting/finance in general. If you have your heart set on a big firm (is it the big 4 or 2 now?) it might be more difficult, but there always are ways of getting your foot in the door. Of course it is somewhat a downer when the Wharton or Yale grads are wined and dined, and you may have to pay for your plane ticket for a fly in interview, since you where not recruited on campus. That is all unimportant once you get the job.</p>
<p>In the interest of full disclosure, I left all of that corporate glamour behind years ago. I work in a small family business, and it is much more satisfactory than all the perqs that came with working for large organizations. I would not choose a program based solely on ranking. That said, I am not hiring people for Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs, or even my alma mater law firm. </p>
<p>All MBA’s had a tough time this year–even the top tier so this year is not evidence of much except a bad economy brought to us courtesy of a slew of top tier MBAs. Irony there.</p>
<p>I have an MBA from a Tier I school. It has helped me my whole life. Even after leaving the work force for a few years to do something else and deciding the come back and do something similar to previous, the degree from that school impressed people enough where they mentioned it. Years ago I applied to be an adjunct in a local (lower tier) MBA program, and the woman who hired me told me that the first thing she noticed was where my MBA came from…that she always looks.</p>
<p>During most of my career, I worked for large public companies that only recruited from top tier MBA programs. Obviously one doesn’t have to make their career at these types of companies. I now work for a small company, but it is owned by someone with a top tier MBA who is impressed (probably a bit too much so) by other top tier MBAs and hires accordingly.</p>
<p>Of course it is true that A) many people with degrees from lower tier schools do wonderfully in life and B) once doors are opened, you still have to be able to do the work well to get ahead. But after 20 years, my sense is that I have had many more opportunities because of where I went to business school.</p>