Career advice blogger Penelope Trunk (left) thinks you should withdraw your MBA application to business school
Penelope Trunk is at it again. With round two deadlines at most business schools just days away, the career blogger and MBA naysayer is advising candidates to withdraw their applications.
“You should not go to business school,” writes Trunk. “If you want to start a company, you should start a company. And if you want to climb the corporate ladder you should do that. An MBA does not help you with either of those goals.
“An MBA gets you into middle management. If you’re a strong performer you get into middle management faster by working than you can by taking two years off of work to get an MBA…In most cases the people who go to business school are essentially announcing they are failing in their work.”
This is familiar clickbait territory for Trunk, who lives on a farm in Wisconsin and homeschools her sons. Seven years ago, she wrote a provocative essay entitled “Why an MBA Is a Waste of Time and Money.” In it, she outlined how the MBA has grown pointless and limiting, compounding debt, inhibiting entrepreneurship, and putting off an inevitable slog back to the real world (see Penelope Trunk: Why B-Schools Attracts People Who Are Lost).
This time, in a post the day after Christmas on Dec. 26th, Trunk cites what she calls five types of underperformers who go to business school.
‘PEOPLE WHO WORK WITH MORONS’
There are, she contends, the people who work with morons. “Did you ever hear the expression ‘A players work with A players?’,” she asks. “The other truism is that A players don’t encourage other A players to get MBAs. If you are a high performer then no boss would encourage you to leave and get an MBA. Because they want to keep working with you. So they’d promote you instead – without the MBA.”
Of course, that’s true. But it is also beside the point because an MBA education makes it far more likely that you will be a high performer at work. It provides the tools, the skills and the practice (yes, practice) to make you a far more effective leader.
A players, in fact, are often MBA players. All the evidence suggests this is true, despite Trunk’s claims to the contrary. Higher education pays and the highest ranked business schools pay the most. A PayScale report done for Poets&Quants a few years ago proves it. The median cash compensation over a 20-year period for people with bachelor’s degrees is $1.3 million. For those with MBAs, the comp is roughly a third more at $1.8 million
But if you have an MBA from a top 50 business school, your cash comp rises to $2.3 million. If it’s from a Top 10 school, it jumps to $2.8 million. And from a top three school? Your 20-year median comp exceeds $3 million (see The Most Lucrative Seven-Figure MBA Degrees).
More important than income, however, may be getting the job that is more meaningful to you and more professionally fulfilling. While there are no guarantees in life, people with MBA degrees from leading schools are far more likely to have careers—not jobs—that give their lives impact and meaning. Surveys consistently show that well over 90% of MBA grads rate the value of the degree highly and 95% say they would recommend their MBA program to others. Over 80% of MBAs report having a high degree of job satisfaction (see Infographic: How Much Is An MBA Degree Worth?)
Who’s the moron here? Trunk should be farming in Wisconsin, not pretending to know what an MBA degree can and cannot do for the people who get one.
‘PEOPLE WHO CAN’T COUNT TO TEN’
Then, Trunk repeats a common myth that it’s only worth going to business school if you can get into a top ten MBA program.
“The only real reason to go to business school is for networking,” she contends. “And the only networking opportunities that could possibly be worth the price of an MBA are the top ten programs.
“These programs are tough to get into because they are sifting. They take only the people who get high GMAT scores and have a work history that displays diligence and strategic focus. So you not only have good people to network with at these schools, but you get a seal of approval that you are likely to continue performing well at work.
“So absolutely do not get an MBA from a second-tier school. Look only at the top ten. Maybe there is disagreement about which MBA programs are in the top ten. But if a school is never on any top ten list then it is not top ten. And just because a school is top ten for online sales or whatever crazy irrelevant specialty they have, does not mean it’s a top ten school.”
That is utter nonsense. Unlike law schools, where employment rates after graduation plunge to disastrously low rates once you get out of the top ten, business schools do an exceptional job of helping career-minded professionals successfully reinvent themselves.
You don’t have to go to a top ten MBA program to use the degree to transition into a new industry, a new discipline or a new locale. And you don’t need a top ten MBA on your resume to land a six-figure job at one of the world’s most admired companies, whether it’s McKinsey, Citigroup, Amazon or Procter & Gamble (see Duke MBA Grads Enjoy Impressive Pay Hike).
Just look at the most recent employment rates for schools that are not in the top ten. At No. 20-ranked Emory University’s Goizueta Business School, 94% of this year’s MBA grads had job offers within three months of graduation with median total comp of nearly $145,000 a year. The top five employers? E&Y, Amazon, PwC, Deloitte, Citigroup, and Georgia Pacific. At Vanderbilt University’s Owen School of Management, with an MBA ranked 33rd, the numbers were equally impressive: A 93% job offer rate, with salary and bonus of $131,000 to start. The major recruiters at Owen this year were Amazon, Deloitte, Wells Fargo, Microsoft, and North Highland.
At the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, with an MBA program ranked 31st, 96% of this year’s graduates had job offers within three months of graduation at median pay well into the six-figures at $122,400. Carlson’s leading MBA employers in 2017 included 3M, Deloitte, Ecolab, Land O’Lakes, and Microsoft. And none of this is hardly unusual. At the 99th ranked program, Texas Tech’s Rawls College of Business more than 91% of the MBA grads were already employed or chose to continue their education three months after commencement this year.
In short, you don’t have to go to a top ten school to reap the benefits of an MBA education and that’s measuring it only on immediate job prospects—not what you learned or who you met and how that will benefit you over an entire career.
‘PEOPLE WHO RUIN A GOOD STORY’
Trunk also maintains that a resume is a story. “The best resume writers can rewrite a resume to make it look like you are ready for your dream job,” she writes. “This works because the job that best suits you will naturally arise from your work history even if you have a weird work history.
“The story is inextricably ruined if you go to business school to avoid the real world. So, for example, if you take time off to raise kids, you are better off saying that then trying to hide it by saying you took time to get an MBA. Because your career choices do not require an MBA so why would you take time off to get one? You look like a poor decision maker. Whereas there is a logical, respectable reason to take time off to start a family, so you look like an effective planner.
“If you get an MBA to make your job hunt easier, you will likely find yourself qualified for the same jobs you were qualified for before the MBA. Which means your resume will show the story of you interrupting your career to get an MBA that did not make a difference in your career. You look like you don’t understand how the business world works.”
Career blogger Penelope Trunk
YOU CAN’T IGNORE THE BUMP IN PAY AN MBA PROVIDES
Seriously? All the evidence suggests the opposite is true. An MBA on a resume is a signal to an employer that you are both smart and ambitious, that your career is so important to you that you made the great sacrifice to get the degree and are better for it.
The bumps in pay prove this again and again. If you got an MBA to get into consulting, your pre-MBA median salary would have been $85,000. With your first job out of school, your salary would jump to $140,000 (see What Industries Give MBAs The Big Pay Bump). If you used your MBA to land a job in tech, your pre-MBA salary would have been $83,000 and your immediate post-MBA pay would have been $120,000.
And by the way, the salary figures grossly underestimate the rewards of the degree because most MBA grads receive signing bonuses and many also get other guaranteed comp and perks unavailable to those without an MBA. In tech, for example, post-MBA total compensation in year one was $178,250, up from $97,675 before the degree.
Overall, MBA graduates who switch careers typically get a $55,000 increase over their pre-MBA pay. The compensation numbers–for alumni three years out of an MBA program–are even more impressive.
MBA alumni who were 24 or under when they started their degree reported that their salary increased by nearly $69,000, up 145% over their pre-MBA pay. Alums who entered their MBA programs when they were 27 and 28 reported salary increases of $67,000, roughly doubling their pre-MBA pay (see Still More Evidence Of The MBA’s Value).
No company pays people that much more dough to take the same job they had before going to business school.
‘PEOPLE WHO CAN’T CLOSE’
Trunk is equally dismissive of MBA education when it comes to one’s ability to sell. “In adult life,” she notes, “we are all in sales. You have to sell yourself to get a date. You have to sell yourself to get an apartment. You have to sell yourself to get a job.
“Think of it this way: If you can’t stand trying to convince someone to give you a lease do you go back to school for the grad school housing? If you can’t stand dating do you go back to school and hope there’s a visiting professor who dates students?
“No.
“So why would you go to grad school because you hate job hunting? It’ll be the same when you graduate. You’ll still have to sell yourself. The school won’t sell you – you’ll still have to sell yourself. Nothing changes except that you are older and you have more school loans.”
Okay. Well, first off, business schools have become exceptional places to learn persuasive skills. Tremendous focus is now put on soft skills, including how to motivate and convince others, how to do a highly polished and effective presentation, and how to build on your inherent strengths and diminish or eliminate your weak spots.
In virtually all business school classrooms, where class participation is often half your grade, students gain invaluable practice selling their perspectives and opinions on core business challenges. Two years of practive among some of the smartest and most ambitious people you will ever meet is the best possible preparation to close a deal.
As for Trunk’s expressed concerns about student loans, yes many people who graduate from business school carry with them the burden of additional loans. But there is so much scholarship aid now available that only a minority of students pay the sticker price on an MBA degree. And the post-graduate rewards make it relatively easy to pay down what debt you need to borrow to earn an MBA. In fact, a third of MBA graduates report that they recouped their investment over their first year of work, while 100% recouped their costs four years after graduation.
‘PEOPLE WHO ARE UNCOACHABLE’
Finally, Trunk contends that the only people who get MBAs are essentially uncoachable. “No one with success in business will tell you that you need to get an MBA,” she claims. “If you are competent at work then during the two years of school you can move up in ranks to wherever you’d have theoretically been after graduation.
“Coachable people listen to other top performers. Uncoachable people cannot get a top performer to talk with them, so they sort through bad advice. The advice you read online about business schools is from sites that have business schools advertising…Getting to the top in a career is a race, and you probably don’t have time to screw around in am MBA program. If you want a shortcut to getting ahead, skip the MBA and just go to Graduate Monkey to learn how to ace the aptitude tests that employers most often give.”
Oh please. There’s hardly an MBA program left that doesn’t provide one-on-one coaching to MBA students who generally have had little to no executive coaching before going to business school.
Besides, easy access to top performers in business greatly improves to students in MBA programs. Top executives are always coming to campus to engage with students. They welcome follow-up calls and visits. Alumni of the schools, often well placed at both large and small companies and startups, are accessible to students for advice and counsel. In truth, an MBA opens the door to conversations with people you would never get to speak with or meet if you weren’t in business school.
MBA students are not wasting their time. They are not ‘screwing around’ in an academic program. At the best schools, they are getting a truly transformative experience that will serve them well throughout their professional lives.
Penelope Trunk, you are dead wrong about the MBA.
DON’T MISS: PENELOPE TRUNK: WHY B-SCHOOLS ATTRACT PEOPLE WHO ARE LOST or STILL MORE EVIDENCE OF THE MBA’S VALUE
The post Penelope Trunk Is Advising MBA Applicants Not To Go To B-School. Why She’s Dead Wrong appeared first on Poets&Quants.
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