I run an MBA admissions site on the side and did some analysis on this.
tl;dr if you are confident an MBA can create a step increase in annual comp of even $10k, the cost is more than covered over the remainder of your career.
Is that really the case for people in tech though - that they could get a step increase of over 10K by pursuing an MBA instead of getting experience at $latest_tech_fad?
After staying at one job for way too long 10 years ago, I’ve hopped jobs 4 times, pursuing that strategy (and learning about modern architecture) and have seen jumps of $7K, $10K, $25K, and $20K. Unless the market sours, I should be able to put together a resume and skillset to get another $25K bump as a consultant within the next 3 years.
Anecdote: was in software, went to top-10-ish MBA school, went back to software industry with higher salary and have not done very badly since. But was it higher than I would have been making in 2 years without going to school? Impossible to know. Is my subsequent trajectory steeper enough to make up for the costs? Impossible to know.
I do feel it’s nice to have that base business, accounting, finance, general management knowledge as a foundation to use to understand things, but is it $150k + $opportunity cost of 2 years worth of education? Not sure...
If you are spending $150K on an MBA, you are spending way too much. In Louisiana, LSU's Executive MBA costs under $60K including all books and meals during the program. If you go Southeastern Louisiana University, their Executive MBA program costs around $20K with the same things included. I went to Southeastern for mine, and I found it very useful in moving into the management chain inside of IT.
Then again, as someone above pointed out, I knew why I was getting an MBA. I can teach myself tech, but some of the business aspects are a pain to teach myself so I paid someone else to teach me those.
Yes, but from what others have said, if you are getting an MBA for the salary increase and not just to learn, getting an MBA from a non top tier school isn't really worth it if you are already in a high paying field.
In the parent's case, it probably made sense though. He was looking to get into management with an eMBA program with (I'm assuming) a school in the state that's probably well-represented at the company. A degree from a regional school is probably going to be less useful in another part of the country and/or for a less well-defined purpose.
I posted previously that I took all of the classes to get an MBA but ended up with slightly less than 3.0. I looked at the salary projections of just staying in tech and keeping my skills relevant and worrying about an MBA from a non top 25 school and it wasn’t worth worrying about the degree.
As I said in another post, I was an MBA dropout but I did learn a lot. I’m not sure how much that knowledge has helped me in my career, but it has helped me communicate with CxOs during the second part of my career without looking like a deer in headlights when they started talking about the business end of things.
Will you be building “business software” for enough of your career to make it worthwhile? I’ve had to learn enough about plenty of verticals over the years to build software. We hire/contract the experts if they don’t already work for us.
I think it’s more the opportunity cost potentially. Amount of lost income by not working for 2 years + can you get that $10k increase in salary by having 2 more years of experience
There are plenty of executive MBA and part time MBA programs from reputable schools (not just for profit and online schools) that would allow you to work and go to school. There are some that only meet on weekends.
My casual observation is that these programs are not taken as seriously (likely because the reduce time commitment is seen as less rigorous) and therefore the payback is more difficult to achieve.
> My casual observation is that these programs are not taken as seriously
In many schools there is no external difference between full time and part time (evening) MBA programs. You walk out the door of both programs with the exact same degree. Nobody outside the program will ever know which path you took to get the degree.
Even if they do notice, anybody who was ever in a school with both a full time and an evening program knows that there are tradeoffs to both. Working a real, full time day job and then taking school on nights and weekends is not easy.
I will actually give more credit to the Executive programs because they require prior work experience (normally 5 years). People are much more likely to remember and be able to use the concepts they have learned in class if they can immediately apply them to real world situations that they have been in.
Depends on the school. If it is a nationally ranked school then it is very likely that on-premise and online versions are the same. You would have to research this for each school.
The one person I know that got an EMBA from a decent respected school is a manager at a FAANG. Total comp is somewhat higher than mine, but he is also on the west coast where the cost of living negates much of the difference and if I went into consultancy, it would negate all of the difference.
I think some people will be focusing on what benefit an MBA can bring to their salary, but I think others may look at it as a way to hedge against long-term obsolescence. It's a way to make the jump to management, architecture, and consultancy - especially in the case of larger organisations.
These roles are rightly challenged by many on HN since they aren't "true" technical architecture roles, for example. Even so, they do exist to support the businesses that create them until there is rationalisation during a recession when many of these roles are jettisoned.
You can do an executive MBA and also a lot of companies will pay back your tuition when they hire you. Or you can get a company to pay for it outright.
>>[...] also a lot of companies will pay back your tuition when they hire you.
By all general measures, company sponsorship in any significant manner is shrinking[1]. I believe the US employer education assistance tax credit is limited to around $5,250[2] per individual per year. Companies that will foot the entire bill for an executive MBA program seem to be few and far between.
This should be tempered with the (surely unquantifiable) negatives that come with continued employment at places that value credentials in this way. Often I've seen, though not in every case, that "step increase for MBA" type employers rarely sustain the type of merit-based increases that occur at places where merit is the only reason for the increases.
Is this from a fancy school? Most MBAs I know are working jobs that have nothing to do with their MBA, making less than $50,000. The only people who benefited from it are guys who did engineering + MBA.
You can say that about most degrees, though. I know plenty of advertising degrees who are waiting tables. I know plenty of CS grads who are stocking shelves. I know mechanical engineers who deliver pizza. I know people with just high school diplomas who make six figures in the Midwest (a lot of money for a cheap area of the country).
No degree guarantees you a job, there's always work and ambition and a lot of luck and timing that factor into anyone's career success.
I'm not sure if it's to the same degree as law degrees, but there's definitely a strong element of credential value from top schools. The conventional wisdom for law degrees is that, if you can't get into a top school, most people shouldn't bother. That's probably at least somewhat true with MBAs as well.
Many people go to law school for reasons other than working in BigLaw wasting their lives away in an office. For example, a great number of lawyers (and budding law school students) work for (or want to work for) for smaller firms, or in-house at companies, or at non-profits, and go home in the evenings to their friends and families.
But yes, if you plan to go to law school solely because you want to make money, it's not worth it unless you go to a top school or graduate at the literal top of your class.
People making crazy 20+ million a year salaries boosts the average quite a bit. But, yea the median change in salary is much worse than the average change in salary.
This analysis overlooks what losing financial freedom for 5-10 years in the most productive part of your life does to you. Ie even if you make the money back later, if there are 5-10 years where your decisions are constrained then you never really make that back.
After staying at one job for way too long 10 years ago, I’ve hopped jobs 4 times, pursuing that strategy (and learning about modern architecture) and have seen jumps of $7K, $10K, $25K, and $20K. Unless the market sours, I should be able to put together a resume and skillset to get another $25K bump as a consultant within the next 3 years.
This isn’t in Silicon Valley, NY, or DC.
I can’t see an MBA helping.