It’s funny that the MBAs would be looking down on everyone! I’m getting my PhD in Art History right now, and everyone I know in grad school (people in the humanities, mostly) think of the MBAs as the dumb jocks.

The stereotype of MBAs among those at my progressive radical-left leaning private liberal arts college was that they were self-absorbed uncouth greedy money-sucking scum.* To some extent, some also had this perception of our econ major classmates, especially considering we did not have an undergrad business major and many end up going into the pro-liberal/neo-liberal econ grad departments and/or related corporate occupations. Kind of amusing to see this level of dismissive skepticism among my undergrad classmates when many of them will also, at some point, end up working for the very same types of corporations they vehemently detested and protested against as undergrads.

Friends in the humanities and social science departments looked upon the MBA students in similar ways as your grad school acquaintances do. Friends in the natural, mathematical, and technical sciences tend to view them with jealous contempt as attendees of the grad school equivalent of a “party major”….especially with their seeming tendency to throw frequent long “networking” parties nearly every week…including ones when midterm and final exams are held.

From knowing a lot of MBA holders among older members of my family and from working with MBAs professionally, many of them will judge an academic degree by how they perceive it will translate into a potentially lucrative job/career upon graduation.** As far as they are concerned, if your degree cannot be directly parlayed into a highly paying prestigious career, it is of lesser worth*** than their beloved MBA.

To be fair, I’ve seen similar attitudes among those in the natural, technical, and mathematical sciences…though that was more because they tended to privilege a more mathematically heavy academic field as more “rigorous” and “proof of one’s intelligence” than an academic field with less mathematical/practically no mathematical content. Interestingly, in their view….an MBA is as rigorous as a “non-rigorous” field such as english lit, history, or any other humanities/social science field.****

*Yes, those were the exact words used by my undergrad classmates.
** Had a manager who was quite skeptical of my undergraduate history major implying it was useless and irrelevant for a professional career beyond teaching and academia. Thankfully, he came around when he saw my computing technical skills in action.
*** And thus, practically worthless/useless in their eyes.
**** IME, those in the natural, technical, and mathematically heavy sciences…especially those in Engineering/CS tend to have the most contempt for MBA students/degree. The fact many of them will end up working for “party hearty” MBA graduates, earn less than them later in their careers, and will remain at the lower end of most non-technical corporate hierarchies adds to this contempt.

I’m sort of puzzled by the woman in the example thinking only Harvard MBAs wouldn’t be intimidated by her education–there are plenty of men with Master’s and PhDs in non-business fields out there…or are they too low-earning for an MBA?

There seems to be a tendency among many with topflight MBAs to thumb their noses at those with undergraduate and graduate degrees in “impractical” fields of study. Though my cousin received his M.Ed from an Ivy league university, the fact his wife has a BS from an Ivy and an MBA from Stanford meant that many acquaintances saw him as the “less educated” and “less intelligent” of the two…and gave him some crap over it…especially when he became a SAHD for a time. Thankfully, she is strong and secure enough in her own competence and abilities to not subscribe to such offputting snobby attitudes.

I’ve also experienced the same dynamic when I dated MBA students because among many B-school students/graduates, the MBA student is considered far superior to all other graduate students…especially one studying something “impractical” as a field straddling the humanities and social sciences. Exceptions I’ve heard to this snobby attitude among many B-school students/graduates are Med school and Law school students…and only because both are associated with highly lucrative prestigious careers.

Despite this dynamic, most reasonable people are secure in themselves and their own abilities to tune out all this noise.

I’m not all that worried about intimidating men with my education–there are plenty of men who have been to grad school, and I’m not limiting myself to ones in my field (actually, I actively want to avoid partners in my field, because competing with your spouse for jobs sucks). The men who wouldn’t date me now would be just as intimidated by my intelligence and mouthiness with or without education–and honestly, I don’t meet a whole lot of men like that, probably because I hang out with geeks.

I’m not currently planning on children, and if I were it wouldn’t be until my late twenties to early thirties, which gives me plenty of time to finish school and get a job. I really boggle at people being worried about “delaying” children from age 22 to age 26 or whatever–that’s not that long, and extra maturity when you have kids isn’t a bad thing. And academia, while still by no means perfect, has become MUCH more friendly to women having children–I have role models of women who manage to be academics and have families. And I realize that I’m lucky, because things were a lot worse not so long ago, but it’s encouraging to see how far things have come.

I’m sort of puzzled by the woman in the example thinking only Harvard MBAs wouldn’t be intimidated by her education–there are plenty of men with Master’s and PhDs in non-business fields out there…or are they too low-earning for an MBA?

The assumption that everything women do is somehow driven by the need to find a mate is incredibly disturbing.

I’m with you, ClassicsGrad.

The odd thing was, he strongly backed a friend of mine, also a woman, and did his best to help her out and clearly respected her intelligence.

But he was still a creep who should have been fired.

ditto for the related venture capital industry, where the rule of thumb is the more mba’s a start-up has, the less likely they are to be successful. technical backgrounds rule.

this represents one of the great shifts in the history of american finance, turning the once exclusive wasp-prep school club into one that resembles the ethnic make up of an mit campus. science is the great racial equalizer, though it hasn’t had the same effect on gender.

it all began at salomon bros under the legendary john merriweather, who was the first on the street to hire scientific genius’ to trade based on mathematical formulas, eschewing th e old boys club of harvard mba who went to choate. there are other factors that have led to the increased diversity on the street, globaliztion of course, milken’s junk bond rev (opening finance to those once excluded) the advent of the mortgage backed security (for the same reson as junk bond), the rise of jewish banks like goldman at the expense of exclusionary white shoes like morgan, merrill lynch/charles schwab and the rise of retail brokerage, and of course the IT revolution and the rise of a brand new type of capitalist…one that’s interested in destroying old-line companies in favor of new more efficient, globalized, and subsequently diverse like google.

so i’d be careful about the mba. the age of the relationship baker, when the M&A specialist ruled, is long gone. the new world order cares less about who you know.

As far as partnering goes–both most of the men and women in my program (students and profs) were partnered with other men and women in graduate study. So in that respect both the men and women were facing the “two body problem”.

Children is the more tricky issue and a lot of the women in my program were struggling with when was the right time to have kids (maybe the men were too but I didn’t hear them talk about it, at least to me).

My girlfriend right now is in a PhD program for physics (about to start her third year) and is undecided what track she wants to take. But at least we don’t have to worry about the two academics problem. And we may end up wanting/ adopting children but that can be at our ‘convenience’ rather than biological necessity.