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caffemacchiavelli comments on Discussion: How scientifically sound are MBAs? - Less Wrong
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I think there's a lot of overgeneralization going on here.
In my subjective opinion, MBA programs are divided into three fairly different groups.
Group one is the top ten (give or take a few) programs (Harvard, Wharton, Stanford, etc.). Your peers are generally smart people and your chances of getting a good job once you graduate are excellent.
Group two is the rest of the accredited programs. To throw in some of my own overgeneralization, these are more or less useless. They can be useful for people who know precisely what they are doing there -- e.g. one guy I knew was an engineer who, his company said, needed an MBA to be promoted up, so he went and got one, and got promoted -- but are not good as education.
Group three is the non-accredited programs including all the online and correspondence courses. They are just useless and a waste of time and money.
As usual, YMMV.
Do you think the Group 1 schools are superior to the rest as far as quality of material goes? I've been talking to a friend who goes to a well-known university in Europe and a fellow entrepreneur who visits an ivy-league US school, and while I don't have the full picture (or syllabus), they didn't seem much more impressed with the experience than I've been.
What do you mean, "quality of material"? The textbooks they use, the business cases they discuss? That stuff is broadly similar.
The major differences are in who surrounds you (and, consequently, what the expectations are). The TAs and professors at top-tier schools can assume that there are very few stupid people among their students and so have no need to dumb down the teaching towards a low lowest common denominator.
It is also generally held as true that on the global scale all top-ten business schools are American.
Yeah, it's not really surprising that Americans think that. Being 5% of the world's population and 25% of its economy leads to understandable insularity of vision. The FT's 2014 businesses school ranking has London Business School, INSEAD in France/Singapore, IESE in Spain and HKUST in Hong Kong in the top 10. The latest Economist rankings have IESE in Spain and HEC in France in the top 10 as well.
The US is certainly dominant but it's not crushing dominance.