In the last couple of years, it seems everywhere you look, there is an article or cable news segment questioning the value of higher education, particularly graduate business degrees.
We’ve all heard the arguments: Earning a degree no longer guarantees increased income opportunities in the future; business school grads are taught outdated modes of thinking rather than how to be entrepreneurial; the rising cost of tuition saddles the student with overwhelming debt.
Some proponents of this philosophy are going so far as to pay students not to go to college. Peter Thiel, Facebook’s first investor, launched the Thiel Foundation two years ago, which gives young entrepreneurs a two-year $100,000 fellowship to develop their ideas, during which time they are forbidden from enrolling in school.
Stories like these invariably receive wide media attention, and while the value of a degree will certainly vary from individual to individual, I am here to argue the opposite position. Earning an MBA was one of the best decisions I made, and a sound investment that is already paying positive dividends.
My decision to earn an MBA was based on a reason common to many who seek the degree: I felt I had progressed as far as I could go in my career and I was looking for a way to make a change that would propel me to the next level. My husband reached the same conclusion and we enrolled in the program together, taking classes in the evenings after work. We both saw it as an investment in our future – even though the hours were long and we had to sacrifice things to be able to afford it, we hoped it would pay off.
I am happy to say that for both of us, it did – he recently accepted an upper-level management position with a new company at a much higher salary thanks to earning the degree, and I was able to make a total career change from banking to education as the academic program director for Clemson’s MBA program. (Full disclosure – I liked the program so much I jumped at the opportunity to build a career in higher education management.)
My husband and I are not alone in our success: Most of our classmates who graduated with us have had similar job changes and raises as a result of earning the degree.
Reading all the negative press about graduate school – and business degrees in particular – runs counter to my personal experience and anecdotal evidence to the contrary I see among my classmates. Realizing I had access to a large group of people who may be able to disprove this negative theory, I conducted a poll of recent Clemson MBA graduates in an effort to quantify the benefits of an MBA degree. We polled graduates from 2009-2013, and here is what we learned (see box, below):
This confirmed my own experience of the sound financial reward of earning an MBA, but monetary rewards are not the only means of measuring value. The networking opportunities available through advanced degrees, particularly through MBA programs geared for working professionals, are priceless. My husband and I continue to seek counsel from our cohorts from the program – people who are now among our close friends.
Here is a recent example: One of the responsibilities my husband has in his new position is to determine how much to invest in research and development and to create financial models to model the potential return on investment. A straightforward task – except over the years the company has not kept consistent measurements of past return, so he had no sound basis on which to model his projections.
He wasn’t sure where to find industry standards and was resigning himself to the fact that he may just have to guess and hope for the best when he remembered that one of our classmates is in charge of R&D at another company (not in the same industry) and has years of experience creating formulas for projections just like this. My husband called, outlined his problem, asked for some general guidelines to get started, and he was off and running after a 10-minute phone call. This is just one example, but I can’t tell you how often a similar situation occurs among our group. We have the benefit of having a capable, knowledgeable team of advisors at our disposal (and we are at theirs).
The decision to pursue a graduate degree always resides with the individual. Everyone has a different situation and motivation that will determine whether an advanced degree is right for him or her. I hope that sharing my personal experience and our survey results will provide a positive counterpoint to the “grad school isn’t worth it” argument. In my opinion, it absolutely is.
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Jane Layton is the academic program director for the Clemson MBA Program.
