Back to School - At My Age?

Ever since I broke the word to my friends and family that I was going back to school, I've been getting the same round of questions - to the point where I eventually put together an FAQ list to send around. I'll spare the reader the obvious personal questions (such as "Is your wife okay with this?" and "Are you going to sell your house? In THIS housing market?" and of course "You're from California; how will you deal with winter in a Northern state?"), because it's the questions that people aren't asking that may actually have some value in a business context.

The first ones would be, why do you need a Ph.D. when you've already got an MBA? Shouldn't you just be able to get a high-paying job in some large corporation? Or failing that, a low-paying but very steady job teaching community college or high school? The answer here is that the MBA has been devalued every year since shortly after I got one, and matters are just going to get worse. Part of it is the proliferation of degrees (like the EMBA, or "Executive" MBA) that sound like a Master's Degree in Business Administration, but require a third (or less) of the coursework and teach the student remarkably little. Part of it are diploma mills, online "MBA" programs, for-profit schools and the like, which have lowered the admission standards to "Having the Money" and the graduation requirements to "The Check Cleared." Some of these are legitimate teaching institutions; some of them are even fully accredited. All of this has combined to flood the job market with fake MBAs, low-quality MBAs, and people who claim to be MBAs but actually aren't really.

Even worse, people who have never been to business school for the most part have no idea what the MBA degree program is actually about, or what it might qualify one to do. Some of them resent the MBA holders, and some resort to the idiotic belief that "Anything I don't understand must not be important," but neither type wants to hire any. Then there are the "rugged individualist" types, who love to point out all of the people who have made it big without benefit of an MBA or even a college degree. If Carnegie, Mellon and Gates (either of the two Gates, actually) didn't need an MBA, why should we? It's the 21st Century remainder of a nasty anti-intellectual streak that has been part of American culture from the beginning, and it's a big part of why our commercial operations do not fare well in an knowledge-driven global economy. It also makes finding a job a royal pain for a management professional. And the glut of people who have an MBA or just look like they do makes the teaching route completely impossible...

Then there's the question of why I would want to go back to school in the first place. Those of you who have been reading this blog over the past year have probably got that one figured out already, but just for the record, I'm also a teacher, a strategist, a scholar, and an acute observer of human behavior -- and I'm too young to just stay a mid-level bureaucrat for the rest of my life. There are still things I want to learn, things I want to discover, places to go and things to do, and while I'm at it I think I'd like to teach a few new management professionals why things you don't understand are important (they can destroy your company) and why when somebody comes to you and says "Hi, I would like to give you a lot of money now," you say, "YES!"

And besides, it should be fun...