Advice to a friend considering business school

A good friend and noted Joe’s-substack-reader was pondering going to business school and asked if I had ever considered it. I’ve certainly thought about it and my views have changed a lot over the years so I figured I’d write them down.

I’ll preface this by saying that some of my best friends and people I respect a ton have gone to business school and had great experiences. My views here are of the institution and what I see as the median experience of people in my orbit.

So, without further ado, thoughts on business school from some guy who hasn’t gone to business school:

I certainly have felt the draw of getting an MBA. First of all, it seems very fun. You get to study interesting things, meet a bunch of people, and live in a college environment again.

Second, doing prestigious things feels nice and that’s especially true when you’re used to academic success and you are thrown into a post-college validation vacuum.

Third, being on a structured path is very appealing, especially if you are feeling aimless in your career. And in the case of top business schools, that path can lead directly to a good deal of money and the promise of more prestige and more structure in the future.

But as I’ve worked with MBAs and had a lot of peers go through it, I have become quite negative on it as a way to invest 2 years of your life and a good deal of money. This is why:

• Some of the smartest, most effective people I know have gotten top MBAs. But they were like this before the MBA; it didn’t change their trajectory much.

• I’ve worked with people where some had top MBAs and some did not in the same role. There has been zero correlation in their effectiveness.

• Most importantly, I am just not impressed with the median person I’ve met getting an elite (call it top 10) MBA. They have not been particularly interesting or intelligent. Rather, it seems to follow this playbook:

  • Person is piped into b-school through banking / consulting, or did something else out of undergrad and now wants to pivot to more prestige and higher pay

  • Person comes from a good deal of money and can pay for GMAT prep which gets them a score good enough to get into Kellogg / Booth / UCLA / Wharton (again, this is my perceived median path)

  • Person goes to one of these schools and has a great time. It’s like college but everyone has money and there’s more cocaine. From the first day, their schedule is filled with “coffee chats” with other students, networking events with firms, and boozy parties. They travel internationally a few times per semester, go to “yacht week,” and maybe even hook up with another, similar Person to whom they’ll get engaged in 2 years.

  • They spend a ton of time prepping for interviews (this seems like a lot of work and like it matters much more than the classes) and go into consulting, banking, product management in big tech, or corporate strategy at a big company.

The Yacht Week website sort of tells the whole story itself

The whole enterprise seems like a good way to entrench the ruling class by introducing its young people to one another. That is not to say it isn’t valuable (obviously, if you’re going to be an investment banker, it helps to meet a lot of future corporate leaders). But I’m not sure it’s very interesting. And it is expensive, so if you are the one footing the bill you need to consider the cost carefully.

If your goal is to join this class of people through banking or consulting, it is probably a good investment — these industries are harder to break into and offer clear financial upside. But if you are just looking for a break and to figure out what you want to do next, it strikes me that there are much better ways to spend 2 years and $200k.

For instance, in tech, I am convinced that someone who is dynamic and smart and compelling (like my friend is) could take a short sabbatical, recharge and network their way into any company by working on projects, publishing their work, and reaching out to people (I wrote about how I’ve gone about that here). This would take substantially less than two years. Or they could spend the two years starting a company and learn more than they would from the MBA. Or they could start a podcast and work really hard on it; that is what 23 year old Dwarkesh Patel did and he just interviewed Mark Zuckerberg and has a network, experience, and knowledge that money can’t buy.

So in summary, I think an MBA makes sense if you’re not paying for it and/or you want to go into a narrow set of traditionally prestigious roles. But there are cheaper and more interesting ways you can explore and pivot and network. What you give up in structure and prestige by forgoing business school seems worth it to me.