On MBA and my dissatisfaction with academia

30thDec'24

My YouTube channel was created right after my third semester in university, during the winter break. I was majoring in Economics and just last semester we had covered Microeconomic theory.

The course was dry, extremely technical and unintuitive. And it was taught exactly like it was. Why was a course taught with so much jargon? Why were we studying what we were studying? Why did it take me ages to understand concepts which were quite simple once the verbosity was taken out of the equation? I did try to communicate this (in the nicest way possible) to the professor, but what I have realized over time is people usually don’t/can’t change much, no matter how hard we communicate the feedback.

What sucked even more was YouTube did not have enough videos to cover the topics. So, during the winter break, I decided to cover these concepts on my own in the simplest language possible. I am glad it was able to help other students like me in pain.

I have a long problem with how technical subjects are taught in general. Teaching is an extremely difficult job and good teachers are scarce. My problem with academia is that nobody becomes a professor because they are good teachers. In order to excel as a professor, you need - degrees from popular colleges and quality research output which is judged based on the name of the publications and number of citations. This matters for universities because it’s a huge component for determining their rankings. Following is a list of criteria that QS uses to rank universities:

- Academic reputation (40%)

- Employer reputation (10%)

- Student-to-faculty ratio (20%)

- Research citations per faculty member (20%)

- Proportion of international faculty (5%)

- Proportion of international students (5%)

Notice how none of these criteria cover teaching quality and classroom experience? (Point taken that it would be almost impossible to objectively review teaching quality.)

Students be warned, the cool professors who seem to be writing cool papers are not usually charismatic. For most professors, the teaching part is secondary. It is a mere distraction from focusing on research work. In some rare cases, their passion translates into classrooms as well. Those classes are orgasmic. But beyond that, most of my learnings happened outside of the classroom. I don’t want to seem extremely critical of teachers, but my dissatisfaction has persisted time and time again. It’s important to acknowledge that most teachers are underpaid, which might act as a demotivator to invest in their teaching skills especially when teaching quality is not linked to compensation.

In an ideal scenario, I would not want to be enrolled formally in a school ever again, which brings me to my problems with an MBA. Nobody does an MBA because they want to learn about business, it's a widely unspoken rule. A lot of business is intuitive, and you can’t really learn how to do business at school. People around me primarily do an MBA for three reasons - they want a job with higher pay, or they want to switch careers, or they just want a break. It's hard for people to pursue entrepreneurship right after doing an MBA as in a lot of cases, these students have the burden of paying off the student loans (after all these degrees are expensive). Some management courses last only for a year, and I am just curious what the learning output is going to be in such a short span of time. During this year, students have to settle in, apply and complete an internship and then sit for placements in a few months! Talk about pressure. Perhaps, the most important business skill anybody should aim to get out of an MBA are confidence and communication. Honestly, just communication is enough. If one can learn how to communicate effectively, confidence follows. I believe these courses, if designed properly, can provide students with ample opportunities to develop communication skills.

Personally, I hope I do not need to do an MBA. I have been privileged enough to have access to a good network and the right resources to take the leap in the job market. I might do it for the fun aspect if I feel like it, but the idea of taking a student loan will probably stop me as I would want to be free of any financial obligation before pursuing an entrepreneurial opportunity.

I don’t blame people for pursuing it, as long as they are clear about why they are doing it and understand its implications. It's a tough life and a worse job market.