Return on Investment

Many years ago, after completing three years of school and spending quite a lot of other people’s money on the process, I completed my MBA and was appalled by the outplacement services available to me at LMU – or, more accurately, at the lack of such services. Not that my departure from my undergraduate program had been much better, if you want the truth, but UCSB was a state university that made no particular claims of career development or job placement for its graduates, and did in fact offer reciprocal agreements that allowed its graduates to use the Career/Placement center at any of the University of California campuses. Loyola Marymount, on the other hand, was advertising its MBA programs as being a means of enhancing one’s career and getting ahead in the world, and if you were the right sort of candidate (one of the middle managers in an aerospace company, for example) it actually might have that effect, but you’d have to make all of the arrangements yourself, because the school had no one (and nothing) that would help you…

Why exactly this was remains a mystery to me. The school’s key demographic may have been people who needed the MBA to achieve their next promotion in a locked hierarchy – get all of the right punches on your ticket, including your MBA, and promotion will automatically follow – but at least half of the business school students I met were people like me, who had decided to make management a career without outside prompting. Most of us needed help in finding a suitable job after the MBA program, and most of us would have been more likely to donate more money to the school and to help recruit more applicants, to take only two of the more obvious reasons why you should try to stay on the good side of your alumni. Even before I started writing snarky posts like this one, I was mad enough to sue. And, as it turns out, maybe I should have…

A story being reported this week by The Associated Press tells the story of a graduate of Monroe College in New York, who is suing the school, claiming that the College has failed to provide her with the job leads and career advice it promises. The story does not enumerate those services, but they can’t very well be worse than the ones offered to me by LMU in 1994, which consisted of absolutely nothing. In fact, at that time the business program didn’t even have a career advisor (the previous one had just quit), let alone a placement center. In this particular case, the student is suing Monroe for $70,000, which is apparently the amount she spent on an Information Technology degree that isn’t providing her with any more help in finding a job than my Master’s degree did at first…

In fairness, the country is in the middle of its worst economic crisis in a generation, and possibly the worst since the Great Depression 80 years ago. And Monroe College has denied the charges, claiming that they provide help to all of their graduates, and did in this case, as well. Still, it should be interesting to see how this case comes out. If the student can prove that the school did not provide services it had promised, she may actually have a case. But if she’s only bringing a law suit because she can’t get a job in this economy, even with her brand new IT degree, she’s probably in for another disappointment…