Marketing guru Seth Godin writes about the recent controversy that erupted when 119 Harvard MBA applicants hacked into a website to see their admissions status early - except they got caught and now none of them are going to Harvard for their MBA:

…what a gift these 119 people got. An MBA has become a two-part time machine. First, the students are taught everything they need to know to manage a company from 1990, and second, they are taken out of the real world for two years while the rest of us race as fast as we possibly can.

I completed my MBA less than a year ago, and I agree with Seth - but only regarding the big full-time MBA programs. I looked very hard at Duke’s very prestigious MBA program and decided it wasn’t a good fit or good value for me. Instead I stayed at Elon and enrolled in the Elon MBA, and it was exactly the right choice for me, for a few reasons:

• Financially the only way I could justify the Duke MBA tuition (roughly $75,000) was if I were going to make a ton of money coming out of the program - and the primary way to do that is going into corporate consulting or investment banking. I’m not interested in the hours, the travel, the stress, or the type of work. So I wouldn’t come out of there making the average $107,000 salary of newly minted Duke MBA grads, and the dollars didn’t work because of it. Elon’s MBA tuition is about 20% of that.

• I asked the Duke MBA admissions office about the profile of their students, and if I remember right only about 1/3 were married. I’ve got to assume that only a small number of those 1/3 had multiple preschool children like me. Not a good fit. Elon has a good mix of younger and older MBA students, married & single, kids & no kids. I could go through as fast or slow as I wanted, so I had the flexibility to dial back the workload if I needed to. I went through in about the average time - two and a half years - but some do it in as little as 21 months or as long as several years.
• Duke offers a part-time program, so I wouldn’t have had to quit work completely while I was in the program. Classes are held every other weekend, all day Friday and Saturday with the Friday night sleepover required. So I’d have to find a way to get every other Friday off work, plus spend all my other waking hours on homework and class projects & research. I don’t think so. Elon’s MBA classes are in the evening, so I had one or two evenings away from home each week (depending on my courseload at the time) and could spend the other evenings and most of the weekend with Gretchen and the kids. I did the vast majority of my homework between 9pm and 3am, after the kids were in bed (and often after Gretchen was in bed).

So I enrolled in the Elon MBA, and it fit like a glove. So while I agree with the spirit of Seth’s post, I’d revise it to give room for nontraditional MBA’s like Elon’s, programs that don’t mold every student into a Fortune 500 suit but allow students to gather the skills and experience they feel they need to take the next steps in their own environment (whatever environment it is), and to do it while continuing to work so the classroom concepts can be applied to our current business environment the next day, not two years later.

It was a great experience for me, and it’s paying off in a dozen different ways.