From: Peter Thiel
The conceit of the MBA is that you don’t need to have any substance at all.
It’s just this management science, and you can apply that equally well in a software company or an oil drilling company or a fashion company or a rocket company.
So for the degree, people should learn substantive things and then on the side you’d pick up some business skills.
But you wouldn’t treat the business degree as the central thing.
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Margaret Wente is taking a lot of heat for the column I quote from below but it's actually very good.
Laurel O’Gorman is one of the faces of Occupy Toronto. She believes the capitalist system has robbed her of her future.
At 28, she’s studying for a master’s degree in sociology at Laurentian University in Sudbury. She’s also the single mother of two children.
“I’m here because I don’t know what kind of job I could possibly find that would allow me to pay rent, take care of these two children and pay back $600 each month in loans,” she said.
Ms. O’Gorman is in a fix. But I can’t help wondering whether she, and not the greedy Wall Street bankers, is the author of her own misfortune.
Just what kind of jobs did she imagine are on offer for freshly minted sociology graduates? Did she bother to ask?
Did it occur to her that it might be a good idea to figure out how to support her children before she had them?
COMMENT: This actually reminds me of an earlier posting:
Punk-style Mom complains about welfare.
It's hard living on welfare but sometimes the recipient's behaviour doesn't seem to make sense.
Elita McAdam is a 37-year-old single mom. She has a 20 year old daughter and a 7 year old son.
The Toronto Star says, "The boy's father left the scene years ago." which implies that her daughter has a different dad.
McAdam has red and black checkerboard hair and what appears to be a pin through her lower lip. That's not exactly business style grooming.
But, then McAdam doesn't need to look business-like because she's in school.
In a job-oriented skills training program at a community college? No. She's studying sociology at university.
But if she's not satisfied with welfare, why doesn't she aim at the quick appropriation of some money-making skills?
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Credential Creep doesn't mean grad school is for everyone -- yet.
Credential Creep is the slow expansion of the designations required to qualify for a job.
Before the 1960s you could get away with a high school diploma to qualify for most jobs. But, after the expansion of post secondary school education, you needed a BA or BSc.
Now, you often need more:
Government research departments that were hiring a B.Sc. back in the 1950s have been moving toward an M.Sc. or a PhD. This is not unreasonable, since the world has become more complicated and specialized.
However, many students who begin graduate programs don't complete them. Ellen Roseman provides a thorough review of the issues to consider before starting, here.
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Jeremiah Owyang told me that this guy is his friend. He writes:
Almost every job today lists as a requirement, fluency with Microsoft Office / Word / Excel.If you can’t run a computer, your job possibilities are limited to the guy who cleans up after the CEO
Of course, he's wrong. You can still be the CEO (but not her secretary).
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