The New MBAs

I read an interesting article today in BW regarding how the Class of 2009 of the new crop of MBAs is doing and the situation was not pretty. Even the ones who graduated from top schools are finding it hard to locate Jobs. This is because most of them use to go the financial sector. But thanks to this recession two of the investment banks are gone for good, one has been acquired by another Bank and the remaining two are now bank holding Companies.

So the prospective MBAs are jockeying for jobs.

When I graduated from my Business School in the early 1990s, U.S. use to produce almost 60,000 MBAs per year. But now the figure has jumped to more than 140,000.

As anybody with even a minimum knowledge of Economics knows that the more of one thing makes it value goes down and this is what is happening in the MBA world too.

One question now which enters my mind is are we really producing more MBAs than we need?. MBAs were supposed to be the cream of the crop back a few years but now with the economic crisis and new criticism of how these Business schools have been focusing too literally on the theoretical side of the market and not enough on the humanistic side, we really need to evaluate the number of MBAs we are churning out.

I have another question as everybody knows the doctors study their ass off to become doctors studying for almost 10 years after High School to become one but their pay is so far less than the MBAs. I mean with so much education and so less pay as compared to the MBAs. I believe now that we should make it a bit harder for students to enter the Business school. To be sure I am not saying this just because I have an MBA (mind you I working towards my second undergraduate degree) but this may increase the value of the MBA in the eyes of the employer. More school does not mean more pay but just to make it a level playing field. Like the lawyers who spend three years in Law School and the doctors who study almost 10 years, we should at least make it a bit harder for people to attend business school by making it a three year school with a mandatory working experience of 1 year in between so that the future MBAs have an appreciation of what they are getting after they graduate.