

What is the value of a formal business education? [Pics] - Alex3917
http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2007/08/what-is-the-val.html

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jraines
This article says absolutely nothing about the value of a formal business
education.

It says something vaguely negative about the value of business _textbooks_ ,
the crapiness of which is pretty well established and acknowledged by
professors and students alike. See here for a classic example:
<http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm> This refers to highschool
textbooks but applies equally well, if not more so, to college business texts.

It's all about the professors. Business is one of those academic fields, like
Paul Graham notes, where the best practitioners are not the educators. While
this is very true as a generalization, there are exceptions -- mainly: non-
practicing educators who happen to be excellent at imparting practical
knowledge, and ex-practioners who were once tops in their field. You will find
these professors concentrated in top schools, and you will not find them
teaching from these textbooks. So there is actually quite a lot of value in a
business education _from a top school_. The well-worn cliche about the value
of networking at these institutions applies as well -- and it's not just
networking in the abstract, it's learning how to network with people who can
get things done, and getting things done for people who expect big things out
of you. Just like I'm sure it is in computer science, the value of the
education is what you extract from it.

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colortone
Wow, what a useless blog post that was.

A MUCH better, less flame-worthy title would have been: "What is the value of
reading a 101 level business textbook from 2005?"

A formal, GOOD, business education is invaluable, _in combination with some
domain-specific skill_

(I do think the pseudo-advertising in the book is appalling)

It's not very useful to know about how "business works" without knowing and
experiencing a real living value chain [whether it be retail, financial
services, web software, or film making, etc].

(disclosure, I have a B.S. in finance from the University of Virginia...and an
MFA in percussion performance from CalArts...all we did at UVA was read HBR
and other intellectually stimulating material and then get grilled on it in
full-class discussions...not to mention courses in C++ [viva the 1990's],
statistics, and Black-Scholes ;-)

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nostrademons
I've got a couple coworkers trying to steer me towards business school (MBA,
not undergrad), and they said that the real value is the network of classmates
that you develop. The courses basically consist of reading lots of case-
studies - if you read a lot, you probably do that or the equivalent anyway.
But you can't fake the experience of getting a lot of smart, successful people
together.

I found that that was also the primary benefit of going to a top private
college. My courses at Amherst weren't all that much better than those at a
good state school - yeah, they were challenging, and the professors were good,
but if you look hard you can get that at many other universities. But almost
every single one of my classmates is doing something interesting, whether it
be physics grad school or traveling abroad or running a hedge fund or
eliminating child soldiers in Africa or writing Broadway musicals or starting
a company with me.

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colortone
I agree that "networking" delivers value, but the academia is very worthwhile,
too.

Marc Andreesson's post analyzing the credit crunch that forced hedge fund
Citadel to dissolve is a great example of the value of "business education."

Command of that realm of knowledge is completely germane to a web software
startup, etc.

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nostrademons
You can get most of that info elsewhere, though. I have no formal education in
finance, but I understood everything in the Sowood letter, even without Marc's
commentary.

(Really, sometimes I think that money managers would do well to read Benjamin
Graham's _The Intelligent Investor_ and nothing else. Many of the complicated
mathematical stuff - which my employer makes a business of selling - actually
_hurts_ your performance in the long run.)

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far33d
Often, it looks like the last proponent of Graham left in the finance world is
Warren Buffett.

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abstractbill
I couldn't see any of the pictures - Yahoo wanted me to sign in.

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Alex3917
Sorry about that, I didn't realize. Here is a 2.4mb zip file of all eight
pictures:

<http://www.alexkrupp.com/picture_library/Business_text.zip>

They are slightly out of order, but it should be pretty apparent what you're
looking at.

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daniel-cussen
And that's how regular people become Pointy-Haired Bosses.

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byrneseyeview
I think the problem here is textbooks, not the subject: in a Java course I
took, students were required to discuss the moral implications of writing
software for judging people's credit (apparently, the problem was that
creditworthiness correlates with race).

But perhaps business courses are so content-free because so much of business
is, too.

