Management PhD/DBA Admission Help

sakky
Sat, 04 Jul 2009 05:10:46 +0000

Thanks for the feedback, folks. It’s surprising how little good data there is about these programs relative to admissions. My undergrad math included two statistics classes, two calculus, discrete probability, and microeconomics. Grad school also included statistics, microeconomics, econometrics, economic and financial forecasting, and data mining and modeling.

Would that be considered insufficient?



Frankly, that’s more than what many current PhD/DBA students at top business programs that I know have.

Nevertheless, I would argue that it is still useful to have a background in Real Analysis, Calculus of Variations, and possibly Dynamic Programming.



But beyond crunching numbers in a theoretical environment, business, like medicine and law, requires experience, inferential capabilties, and intellect among other things. It’s not chemistry, where having a phd means that you’ll be a good chemistry teacher. Who the heck wants lean from or go to a doctor who has all the education and never practiced, or a lawyer that’s never praticed? Likewise, the concept that someone with 10 years of big time business experience and the intellectual capability would be a less qualified person to attend a management phd/dba program, and ultimately teach business, than some smart, hard working kid who went straight from undergrad to the doctorate, and started teaching business at the age of 27 or 28 with no experience, is ridiculous! Yet, it seems as though that kind of background is considered more favorable, especially if there is evidence of research.



Yeah, well, what can I say? That’s what business academia wants. I don’t agree with it, but I didn’t make the rules. The sad fact is that you’re not going to be rewarded for practical knowledge. The rewards come from academic publications, which often times have no real-world applicability.



Logically, it makes little sense,



Well, actually, it does make sense logically, at least from an internal standpoint. The fact is that MBA programs are by far the most lucrative of all of the programs within academia, and will surely remain so for the near future. As long as students desire MBA’s, which will be the case as long as the top employers continue to recruit out of MBA programs, then business schools have no reason to change. They can continue to publish research papers that practitioners never read, miseducate MBA students with professors who are unqualified to teach business and uninterested in doing so, run research programs that nobody really cares about, and promote professors to tenure for a body of research work that nobody will ever use, and it won’t matter. As long as the MBA programs continue to pay the piper, the piper will continue to play his song.