All The Time, All The Expense? Is An MBA Necessary?

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Are MBA degree holders a dime a dozen? According to Marina Murray, associate director of research at the Graduate Management Admission Council, there are at least 250,000 students enrolled in MBA programs annually, and a whopping 100,000 MBA degrees are awarded annually. This represents at least 66 percent of all graduate business degrees conferred in the US, reports the Graduate Management Admission Council.

There are so many MBAs floating around, Venture capitalist Peter Boyce in an interview with OneWire CEO Skiddy von Stade, says the advanced degree might now be unnecessary. Boyce himself doesn’t have one and has founded businesses. And it was way back in high school, that he created his first company fixing computers. During college, he co-founded two organizations to help unite young entrepreneurs. Now, he’s an early stage investor in student startups through Rough Draft Ventures, a company he co-founded, reports Business Insider.

For Boyce, his MBA is his actual experience.

“I almost feel like I’m getting my MBA on the go right now in a lot of ways,” he says. A lot of the programs are fantastically powerful, especially for helping folks understand “how do you take a company from 50 to 100 people internationally? So that management skill is not easy to necessarily do if you’ve never run a company that size before. So I think it’s an interesting compliment or supplement for someone that operates a company. I think for myself, being in venture [capital], you get to see early stage entrepreneurs go through those different phases and go through those different steps, and so I almost feel like I’ve gotten kind of a taste of it.”

Also some studies have found an MBA today might not be worth it financially. According to a survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council, expected median salary for newly hired M.B.A.s has been basically flat between 2008 and 2011, reports The Wall Street Journal. Graduates with minimal experience of three years or less, the median pay was $53,900 in 2012, a drop of 4. percent from 2007 to 2008, according to an analysis conducted for WSJ by PayScale.com.

Meanwhile tuition has increased 24 percent in the last three years, leaving many MBA grads with high debt. Among households headed by people with student debt who attended graduate school and are under 35, average student loan debt climbed to $81,758 in 2010, found a Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data. Compare that to tuition rates in 2007 which was $55,594.