These results irk me to no end (because I have a lot of professorial friends in the b-schools that look to improve their programs all the time), but the blogosphere consensus as seeded by Seth Godin appears to be that the MBA is not an education. He is not alone in his claim. He is supported by a number of other prominent MBAs referenced in blogosphere conversations (click here, but note that the Blogpulse computation may take a while).
Note there are some potential measurement errors here in terms of what is tracked (looks like only formal trackbacks are included) because other conversations have clearly been spawned from Seth’s thread.
That said, presuming the Blogpulse measurement is representative of the crowd consensus, is the wisdom of crowds correct here? I’ve casually thrown in the "crowds" argument to support some of my prior posts, so I can’t have it both ways if the crowds argument is a valid argument, and the crowd concludes the MBA is bunk. Have any pre-conditions for the wisdom of crowds been violated in the Blogpulse chart?
Yes – you aren’t getting a full set of independent judgments. You’ve got some selection bias in that one population of professionals for whom an MBA may not be very useful is talking alot to each other, possibly encouraging some major groupthink, while the other relevant populations – i.e., people in professions where MBAs really are useful – aren’t posting at all. (Why aren’t the other MBAs posting? Hard to say. You’ve discussed in earlier posts some of the possible reasons for the lack of mgmt consultants & I-banker types in the blogosphere.)
If you believe in wisdom of crowds then you should also believe in the powers of market economies, and MBAs are still worth a lot of dollars on the open market. There must be some value to having one, or the high premiums paid to hire them would disappear. Any good market economist will tell you that actual prices are the best measure of true beliefs (everything else is “cheap talk” in comparison).