I see it as kind of like Home-Ec. It’s supposed to teach you how not to run your company into the ground and these are skills that many entrepreneurs lack. However, it shouldn’t have had the prestige that it somehow had for so many decades.
The flipside of “some MBA in middle management is screwing over our product and customers with his greedy meddling” is “turns out we were actually selling at a loss and went out of business”. Lots of businesses fail because the people running them don’t really know what they’re doing.
I’m all for this trend if it will end the phenomenon of the MBA training to be a generic “business manager” or of someone with five years or less of real business experience trying to gain the credential. Full-time MBA graduates like that result mainly in McKinsey Kiddies and managers who can’t think past the next quarter.
Part-time and executive MBA programmes can fill most management training needs quite nicely in combination with real-world work experience and/or graduate education in specific domains. That will lead to product- and service-focused managers who are concerned as much about the long-term viability of their companies and the satisfaction of their customers as they are about making shareholder- and bonus-friendly numbers in the short term.
But more subtly, the proliferation of spreadsheets led to users treating the spreadsheet as reality, simply fooling with assumptions to make the model produce a needed outcome, and becoming desensitized to the fact that the model wasn’t reality.
This is worth an essay all in itself. I’m of the strong opinion that this resulted in a lot of the malaise we’ve seen in neoliberal globalism over the past 40 years. Over that period the economists and MBAs, perhaps lulled by increasingly powerful data analytics, forgot that the map is not the territory.
UT has an endowment that other schools could only dream of. Oilfields, for instance. At one point in 2018 its total endowment was valued at $31 billion. Hopefully that keeps tuition relatively low for the students. When I went there back in the late 90s, I was able to pay my tuition with my wages from my summer job.
Pretty much the only benefit universities are still competitive with is tuition discount/reimbursement, so it’s not a bad place to work while you get an advanced degree (and probably something of a self-fulfilling cycle as to why so many university employees have them). When I was working as staff at a university, a lot of my coworkers (of all ages and stages in their careers) got MBAs simply because with the university benefits it was cheap enough to be worthwhile as a resume-booster for them.
We’re a transitional generation. I look at it like a carnival: due to timing and good fortune maybe 1/5 of us Xers get to keep riding the (increasingly ricketty) Boomer-Coaster long after it closed and after everyone else our age and younger was left only with the rigged games run by the crooked carnies.
Or that economics doesn’t have a good measure of happiness. There is a fair bit of lip service paid to “utility” and the like in economics classes, but when you get down to theory the only thing they can really count is money so it ends up standing in for everything. If money doesn’t automatically and always bring happiness then your economic theory is flawed.
An acquaintance of mine did a dual JD/MBA program and then went on to start his own company. He never practiced law but said his experience was that, whatever the general public’s view of lawyers is, many of the business people he worked with at least had a begrudging respect for the JD. At worst, he said, the view was “well, at least we know he’s probably reasonably intelligent”.
In contrast, he said he would trade his MBA for a stick of gum and that his experience was that even people with MBAs tended to not read too much in to seeing an MBA on a resume. But HR departments like nice concrete standards they can look for, especially with the rise of electronic hiring platforms that rely on keyword searching. So the MBA became one of those “it’s only important if you don’t have it” things.
(I have a JD and so yes, it’s fair to accuse me of bias, or to suggest that he was tailoring his message for his audience. I’m just relaying the anecdote).
I’m a disagree there, I think… we were the first to realize that we got screwed in a way our parents did not. Some managed to get the boomer coaster (especially some of the gen xers who ended up in the tech field right around the time the internet exploded), but I think more of us struggled with students loans, have had done less well than our parents, have less wealth stored away, are probably not going to get anything out of social security, and if our parents did not do as well as other boomers, it’s harder caring for them since we have fewer siblings to share the work and less money to support them.
The boomers were a historical anomaly that we’re all expected to live up to and we’re blamed for failing to do so, despite the very real structural changes that have happened since the 60s…
I don’t really disagree with anything you said. We’re transitional in the sense that a still-significant percentage of us get to enjoy something approximating a Boomer-level lifestyle in a way members of subsequent generations (kids of 1%s excepted) just won’t when they reach their 40s and 50s. The 20% estimate on Xers may be a bit high and is certainly an upper limit that trends toward the older end of the generation, but it’s hard to nail an exact estimate.
In terms of the topic at hand, for example, I’m in a similar situation to @anon27007144. What differentiates me from a Boomer is that I didn’t take the low-low tuition for granted, Old Economy Steven style, because (as you note) we were all well aware starting with the election of Reagan that we were going to be screwed over on every front the moment it became possible.
If by “humanities programs” you mean weapons engineering, AI-driven defense science, military robotics, and other such modern fields of “study”, then, yeah, the money’s going right back into humanities.
Those are not the humanities… those fields have shit loads of money already and do not need more public funding. Our basic lack of understanding of our fellow human beings and the diversity of human civilization and thought are killing us and killing others.
