<p>First off, I find the ‘corporate polls’ to be extremely suspect. After all, like I said before, what corporations ultimately want is somebody who will work extremely hard for minimum wage and demand nothing… That is why superpower schools like HBS, Wharton, and Stanford get dinged (relatively speaking) by corporations because graduates of these programs demand a lot of power and a lot of pay, and corporations obviously don’t like that. But that’s not a bad thing, that’s actually a good thing. Schools should ultimately be about giving the STUDENTS what they want, not the corporations what they want. </p>
<p>For example, one of the major knocks about, say, Stanford, is that corporations always complain that they can’t get the Stanford MBA’s to take jobs outside of Silicon Valley because the graduates just like it there too much. But why is that a bad thing? I think that’s actually a good thing. The Stanford graduates are apparently getting something they want, which is to stay in Silicon Valley. If the corporations don’t like that, that’s their problem. They can’t or won’t give the graduates what they want. </p>
<p>Similarly, take HBS, Stanford, and Wharton. Another constant complaint about these grads is that they are arrogant and they demand too much money. But the way I see it is, HBS, Stanford, and Wharton grads have a reason to be arrogant. They’re arrogant because they are good, and they know it. And they can demand a lot of money because they know that they can. At the end of the day, they are the highest paid of all the MBA classes. </p>
<p>Ultimately, corporations want a bunch of people who are not only highly skilled, but who are also highly pliable and will do whatever the company wants them to do without complaint, including the crap jobs. But as an MBA student, is that what you want? It’s certainly not what I want. I want to have the bargaining leverage on my side, and if that ultimately means ticking off some corporations, so be it. I want the corporations to know that if they don’t give me what I want, I can go elsewhere.</p>
<p>But anyway, none of that is to say that Michigan is a bad school. Far from it. And I can see how one could make a case that Michigan might actually be highly competitive with, say, Columbia, which is probably the lowest of the M7. But I think it’s a rather hard case to make that Michigan is as good as half of the M7. As good as Chicago? As good as MIT? As good as Stanford? That’s a pretty tough case to make.</p>