The Death of the MBA

By Aaron Hurst on May 8, 2009 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

In an earlier blog post  I wrote about an article in the New York Times that described the change in the prestige of careers and how careers in the public sector may have surpassed jobs in consulting and on Wall Street as being at the top of the list.

Upon further reflection, it brought me back to a conversation that I had with my father when I was still in college and he was in graduate school at the University of Michigan getting his PhD in Higher Education Administration.  What occurred to both of us in the conversation over a dozen years ago was that professional schools are not organized effectively.

MBA programs are the ones that offer the best education and training in management.  It is really rare to find a program in health care management, higher education administration, nonprofit management or related fields that comes even close to providing the training as an MBA.
 
The curriculum in these areas simply isn't as evolved -- it is in business that management has been studied tirelessly because it is where the skills have been economically rewarded.
 
The other issue is that other degrees for nonprofit leadership are harder to sell as relevant to other fields if you decide, like most people, to switch careers at some point down the road.

An MBA provides the best education and a degree that is valued in almost every profession.  I counsel professionals seeking a master's degree that going with any option other than an MBA will result in fewer practical skills, a less valuable network and may prove worthless in five years when they decide on a different career path.

So, why I am singing the praises of the MBA degree in a post about its demise?

We need professionals in every field that can manage people, projects, programs and organizations. The specifics for each field are secondary to these core management skills.  As more and more of our top talent seek careers outside of corporations, the MBA schools need to adapt to recognize that their value lies not in teaching business but instead in teaching management.  The Harvard Business School needs to become the Harvard School of Management.

This should also become the organizing principle for professional schools. Management should be the common curriculum and the specialized fields should be secondary (not the other way around as it is today).

You could get your MM (Master's in Management) and then get a "minor" (or have a track) in a specific field of interest like health care.  It could also be designed so that every 5-10 years you could return and add an additional minor to reflect a career switch or new interest.

This model would better meet the needs of professionals today and therefore make professional schools more effective.