Asymmetrical Information

I happen to be a pregnant MBA student and I think that it actually has the potential to work out quite nicely. Being a student for the first few months of my child's life, I will have a more flexible schedule that will allow me to be home, and I won't have the big void on my resume that supposedly will set me back by taking time out later in my career. There will certainly be hardships and tradeoffs, but I do not believe these would be made better by sacrificing the quality of my education.

The five year rule is a good guide to follow, whether it should be four, or eight, or even ten, they all have their adherents. As you put it, if you allow the snotty-nosed kids instant access to the MBA programme, with no world experience and a great GPA/aptitude test, then you automatically draw your MBAs from a much smaller pool of potential talent - kids who go to ivy leage prep schools/ivy league univerisities, and more money than cents, usually.

I felt like a completely unclued person until I was about 25 years old. Then, every kind of...clicked, and then alot of things became much easier than they had, and I attribute it to have enough world experience where I had to make decisions (and live their consequences) on my own, not my parents, the school, or whatever bureaucracy I was associated with.

Definitely, if you go with the continuing pressure of preferential treatment for certain groups, you skew your population, and you then tend to end up with a skrewed result. My thought is a minimum 5 years, but 10 might make you a much better student and valuable post-education employment. It's easier to say that, being on the far, far side of 40, than it would've been at 25.

A 2.96 GPA and U Chicago Business School? What was your GMAT score? 8000?

Or are you considered a disadvantaged minority because of your great height and contrarian political views?

It must have been affirmative action that got you admitted...

in essense this boils down to the answer we don't have about the crash between physical reproduction, and the world of unintended consequence, timing, and staying in the workstream.

In this, women who desire a family will always be at a disadvantage. It's the answer we don't have.

I have a friend who is a research scientist [think human genome project]... who explained to me in detail about why it didn't matter if she wanted children. There was pretty much no way to do it. As one of the few females even doing the research, she couldn't stop anywhere along the line, or she would risk being overtaken by events or someone else. Falling out of stream. She was long past worrying about it, but simply told me it was her choice. I told her it reflected badly on our society that we couldn't figure it out...

It would require draconian and repugnant laws to make it equal though. [IMHO, natch...] Because basically you have to account for the fact that part of your workforce takes themselves out of it possibly more than one time in their career. And yet you need to be able to add them back, when they are done. And you have to account for the fact that they may decide NOT to come back after you have held their job open...

That fact is central to all of this. The corporate mommy track, the question of when an MBA works, the science... etc... All of these things are flowed in such a way that you cannot take yourself out of stream without some consquence. In the extreme, you crash your career.

Sure you can make a law... but then you also have to make a law to keep competitive advantages from tilting the playing field and you have to measure the impact... Ultimately you end up with central planning socialism. Because everyone has to fund the additional overhead you pay for...

Anyway, that is kinda tangent to the current argument, but it seems like this argument is different dressing on a more basic one...

D

Life's a bitch. You can't have a cake and eat it too. I think the 2 years MBA model is outdated. The top schools in USA should adopt what Europe is doing. Have 1 year intensive MBA and heavily recruit older candidates who have been in the industry for well above 8/10 years who know what they want to do with the MBA. I just don't get these early 20's getting MBA's just because they have a dream of becoming a CEO of a major company one day.

I don't think it's the pregnancy that's keeping women off the MBA schools. If the statistics to be trusted, there are more women in graduate programs (LAW, Medicine,etc.) than men these days. Obviously these women have no issues with the pregnancies as we all know that LAW and Medicine or even some PHD's can take up to 6/7 years by the time you are done.

Business as a whole; the type-a personalities, the deal making, the cut-throat BS don't appeal to women as much as it does to men. It doesn't appeal to men either but this is what some men, including myself have come to accept it for whatever reasons. Business is not fun, it doesn't enrich your soul, and at the end of the day it doesn't make you happy. That's why women do not go to MBA in droves.

Furthermore, women can always marry the hotshot investment banker or the IT billionaire, right?

It's highly unlikely I'll ever be in the room with that hotshot investment banker or internet billionaire, and the competition for *that* job slot is more intense than anything I'm likely to experience in business, with less likely reward.

That being said, I agree that compressed MBA programs make more sense, but might not make enough sense to be practical for many women. After 10 years in business, I earn enough so that 1 year off, plus $30K to $80K for a good to top program, is money I would never recoup from the MBA itself. (I already make more than the average MBA grad.)

I am no expert on this, but it seems like these days, a lot upper-middle class women don't get pregnant until 35 or so. Therefore, they do have time to go to B-school, law school, or whatever.

I am not saying this is good or bad, just that it's what a lot of people seem to do these days.

D: "I told her it reflected badly on our society that we couldn't figure it out... "

Why? Having a kid (I have two) is a fulfillment thing like religion, marriage, or hobbies. It will not necesarily make you a better employee. Why the hand-wringing that people have to make choices?

Would you think life is equally unfair if your friend wanted to quit for a year and sail around the world on a merchant steamer, or follow the Grateful Dead for a year, or join a Buddhist Monastery?

Feminism is about GETTING choices, not "I want one of everything I see." Men don't get one of everything either...it's either poor and involved, or rich and estranged. I, myself, am neither as rich nor as involved as I'd be absent the requirement to compromise.

Compressed and accelerated MBA programmes don't make much sense to me. I entered B-school with a CFA and seven years in the investment business, and after spending two years taking relevant coursework at a top school and notching near-top-of-my-class marks, I graduated knowing only a small fraction of what a person needs to know to do my job well.

Taking fewer classes, or an equal number of classes in a shorter amount of time, would only make me worse off.

Maybe it would work for bankers (there are only so many ways to build an LBO model) and salesmen (as no one on the buyside who matters listens to them no matter how smart they are), but many of the rest of us could use one or two or three more years. And we can't get them autodidactically after graduation because we work 80-hour weeks.

Also, I can't believe that I just wrote "programmes."

In this, women who desire a family will always be at a disadvantage.

There is always surrogate pregnancy. A bit expensive at the moment, but in years to come, it might be sensible to outsource it to countries with lower labour costs (as it were).

A high average student age was one of the key criteria for my choice of business school, and I am very glad it was. I learned at least as much from my fellow students bringing to bear their real world experience of business problems to the course material as I did from the faculty and more formal elements of the course. And for us to create that value for each other, we had to have real experience - not just of being employed, but from having progressed sufficiently far to have encountered and had to deal with (not just observed) real business challenges.

Mine is also a vote for the one year programme. It was the most intense year of my life, but I was not under any illusion that somehow having an MBA would give me all I needed to do any job well. It's being a one year course also, I strongly suspect, made it much easier to get together the experienced and committed student body I valued - and that experience and commitment in turn allowed us to be extraordinarily productive during the year.

Suggestion, in an earlier thread I described the research benefits (albeit tongue-in-cheek) of bringing to full term a little nipper when there is no organic human female involved (why do that when there are corporate/research windmills to tilt at?). Of course, I didn't address the possible necessity of such a development and birthing might do to the young protoplasm?fetus>baby.

I am in favor of the 5 year rule, plus a work full time requirement. I am also in favor of fulltime night school (8 hours per trimester) for 5 consecutive trimesters. The 5 years of experience allows the students to bring a great deal to the classroom. Night school allows the professors to work full time as well, which means they have "been there, done that". I did it that way and would recommend it to anyone. Also, doing it that way, my employer paid for most of it, which helped a bunch both during and after.

Where I went, we had about 3/4 of the students had work experience and the remainder were right out of undergrad. This worked out pretty well since we had a critical mass of people with something to bring to discussions and still got to have plenty of "foils". The kids could be depended on to ask stupid questions that would move things forward.

I'm not sure how much value the kids got from the program, other than the credential. They didn't cause the program as a whole to suffer.

dbp

falkoyn: Those 9 months of pregnancy aren't the main problem. For the next 18 years the mother's time isn't her own...

markm, there's definitely a difference in the way a person should live their life, if there are young in the nest. I think you overstate the 'time isn't her own' just a wee bit. There are too many factors to really discuss it well, but I'd hope there was an adult male of the species well-represented in the family, in which case the tenor between the parents matters tremendously as to whether undeveloped sopranos, altos and baritones are raised with just that right touch of discipline, leniency, nannying and love.

If the '...mother's time isn't her own...' is the single most factual content of her life, the balance is skewed.

One of my favorite topics. I was really annoyed that I had to be so old by the time I graduated from business school. But I wouldn't compress business school or waive the work requirement. High school and college were largely a waste - just passing time to get the credential. 6 years combined would have been sufficient. (In retrospect, I realize I could have cut a year out of undergrad, but I was too late to do it. And it wasn't because I went to a crummy school. I went to supposedly one of the top 5 schools in the country.) Pushing 30 at graduation is tough for having a family. You want to be established in your career, not proving yourself, when the kids come.

One of my favorite topics. I was really annoyed that I had to be so old by the time I graduated from business school. But I wouldn't compress business school or waive the work requirement. High school and college were largely a waste - just passing time to get the credential. 6 years combined would have been sufficient. (In retrospect, I realize I could have cut a year out of undergrad, but I was too late to do it. And it wasn't because I went to a crummy school. I went to supposedly one of the top 5 schools in the country.) Pushing 30 at graduation is tough for having a family. You want to be established in your career, not proving yourself, when the kids come.