Most people don’t do an MBA to do academic work. There are a lot of skills that are quite useful in the business world that don’t correspond to academic knowledge.
Indeed, I felt this point had already been covered/established; that MBA’s are for business in practice and that they are increasingly less valuable as the supply has exploded while the quality of them has degraded. I was expanding the conversation to include a point about their utility being further reduced by the issuing authority also not placing a high value on their own degrees. Then I speculated on why the universities would do this and I posited a financial incentive, particularly in all these new programs in non-ivy league and non-endowment based universities.
Honestly, it could be a stretch, I think there is some case for the universities issuing these coursework masters MBAs as a case of arbitrage. They found a worthless product to sell which has a high cost and demand. The additional institutional cost is very limited as they simply hire a few more adjunct professors and use already build/under utilized classrooms to run the courses. All they have to do is stamp their seal of approval on a degree document, pay something like $1,000 per student for space and teaching, then collect $20-30,000. The universities found a way to print some extra money; even if the jig is up on something like an MBA, other coursework based masters programs will continue to rake in the money.
Most people don’t do an MBA to do academic work. There are a lot of skills that are quite useful in the business world that don’t correspond to academic knowledge.
Indeed, I felt this point had already been covered/established; that MBA’s are for business in practice and that they are increasingly less valuable as the supply has exploded while the quality of them has degraded. I was expanding the conversation to include a point about their utility being further reduced by the issuing authority also not placing a high value on their own degrees. Then I speculated on why the universities would do this and I posited a financial incentive, particularly in all these new programs in non-ivy league and non-endowment based universities.
Honestly, it could be a stretch, I think there is some case for the universities issuing these coursework masters MBAs as a case of arbitrage. They found a worthless product to sell which has a high cost and demand. The additional institutional cost is very limited as they simply hire a few more adjunct professors and use already build/under utilized classrooms to run the courses. All they have to do is stamp their seal of approval on a degree document, pay something like $1,000 per student for space and teaching, then collect $20-30,000. The universities found a way to print some extra money; even if the jig is up on something like an MBA, other coursework based masters programs will continue to rake in the money.