A decade across operations and finance means I've built the spreadsheet for a lot of decisions: capital requests, make-or-buy, whether a product line earns its keep. An MBA is the first purchase in years I can't get to resolve in one, and I've been trying since the summer.
The skills case is the easy part to audit. My undergrad was plant biology, soil science, organic chemistry, and enology. No statistics, no accounting. Everything I know about either I learned at work, which means I'm competent in the exact shapes my jobs required and untested everywhere else. A good MBA core would pour a foundation under a house I've been living in for ten years. That's worth something. It's also the weakest argument for the degree, because every course in that core exists online for one or two percent of the tuition. Coursera will sell me the accounting; edX will sell me the statistics. If skills were the whole case, the decision would already be made, and the answer would be no.
The harder question is access. The standard pitch is that an MBA pays off for people changing lanes: into consulting, into banking, into a different industry, where the school's brand and the alumni network do work a resume can't. I'm not obviously that person. I'm ten years into beverage operations and finance, and the next roles in that lane open on track record, not letters. I've looked for the door in my own industry that's locked for lack of the degree and haven't found it. Which turns the question into a more uncomfortable one: the MBA pays clearly only if I'm changing lanes, so deciding about the degree means deciding whether I'm leaving — and I notice I keep not answering that part.
The loudest answer online runs one direction. The 2022 chorus says the MBA is overpriced, the knowledge is free, a certificate covers the credential, and the real move is to just build things in public. I'm partial to that argument because I'm currently living its best version: I've spent this fall teaching myself to code, and the self-study is working. But I can also say why it's working. Code produces an artifact you can check; the site renders or it doesn't. My record with self-study that ends in a certificate PDF instead of a working thing is worse, and accounting is that kind of study. What a program sells beyond the syllabus is structure, deadlines, classmates, and a signal. Ranked by how badly I think I need them: structure first, classmates maybe, signal unknown.
The mechanics, at least, have moved in favor of asking. Full-time is out; two years of forgone salary fails the math at this point in my career. That leaves part-time evening programs, roughly three years while keeping the job, and online programs, which lost most of their stigma when everything else went online in 2020. The GMAT, which would have meant months of prep, is now waivable at a long list of schools for applicants with quantitative work experience; the test-optional wave from 2020 never receded. The cost is still serious. Tuition alone is a number I would build a sensitivity table around in any other context, and that's before counting three years of nights. The nights are the real constraint, because right now they're going to JavaScript. A part-time degree and a self-taught coding habit draw on the same account, and I've already committed part of the balance.
So, mid-December, the honest position: undecided, with one small commitment I can defend. I'm going to draft an application this winter. The essays ask the question I've been circling this whole post, which is what I would actually do with the degree. If I can't write an answer I believe, that's a result, and a cheap one. If I can, then I'll have to decide whether to send it.
— Lo