Is getting an MBA worth it?

Key questions to ask yourself

At least once a month an ambitious and hard-working person in their 20s asks me, “Should I get an MBA?” Here’s how I respond to those inquiries.

First, it's critical to determine whether your expectations for an MBA are aligned with what the degree will likely do for you. MBA programmes offer three different types of benefits, all of which vary tremendously from one school to another:

1. Practical leadership and management skills. Management education has changed significantly over the last few decades. Previously it focused on quantitative analysis in areas such as finance and operations, with little emphasis on other aspects of organisational life. As a result, MBAs were often seen as bean counters, myopically focused on data and out of touch with the challenges managers face in the real world.

MBA programmes responded by expanding their offerings in areas such as strategy, organisational behaviour and leadership. Business-school curricula are still intensely quantitative, but as Stanford Dean Garth Saloner told McKinsey in an interview in 2010, “The [QUANTITATIVE]skills of finance and supply chain management and accounting and so on, I think those have become more standardized in management education, have become kind of what you think of as a hygiene factor: Everybody ought to know this.”

The special advantage of an MBA program is the opportunity to develop leadership and interpersonal skills with a group of peers in a sequence of experiential courses informed by current research.

So ask yourself:

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Do the MBA programmes I’m considering provide practical leadership and management training?

How well-established are these courses?

How much support do they have from the school?

How much support do they have from the surrounding community?

What do alumni say about their experiences in these courses?

How have they benefited from this training?

What alternative means are available to me to develop these practical skills?

2. A credential that sends a signal to the marketplace. The nature of the signal being sent depends on the specific MBA programme's reputation, and this is not simply a matter of prestige. Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton routinely top lists of US business schools, but they also have a reputation for entitlement and arrogance.

While some firms seek out graduates from elite schools, others avoid them out of a concern that they will be difficult to work with and disruptive to the established culture.

So ask yourself:

What market am I in now?

What markets might I seek to enter in the future?

Who’s interested in my services?

How might this change if I had an MBA?

How are MBAs perceived in these markets?

What signals does an MBA send in these markets?

What stereotypes (both positive and negative) might I face as an MBA?

What is the specific reputation of the MBA programmes I’m considering?

How are these schools and their alumni viewed within my desired markets?

What alternative means are available to me to send the signals I desire to communicate?

3. Membership in a learning community and access to an alumni network. Business school emphasises working in groups, and MBA students often learn as much from their peers as they do from faculty, so it's important to consider who you'll be working alongside for two years.

So ask yourself:

What do I know about the students at the MBA programmes I’m considering?

Are they like-minded peers?

Do I see myself learning alongside them?

What do I know about the alumni networks of these programmes? How active are they? Are they concentrated in geographic areas and professional fields of interest to me?

What support does a school provide to its alumni network and to individual alumni? Do alumni return frequently to participate in events and activities at the school?

In association with Harvard Business Review Ed Batista is an executive coach and an instructor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. For more on topics such as this see our new site World of Work