The Economist’s Free Exchange blog responds to Penelope Trunk’s Don’t try to dodge the recession with grad school post.
Penelope:

3. Business school is not going to help 90% of the people who go.
Here’s the problem with business school. Most people want to work for themselves, but you can’t learn entrepreneurship in school – you have to learn by doing. And a business degree that is not from a top school is not going to get you very much at all, according to recruiting firm Challenger & Gray. Finally, Harvard Business School has acknowleged that if you are planning to downshift for kids around the time you are 30, your ability to leverage an MBA is drastically compromised.

Free Exchange:

But an undergraduate degree has become—and graduate degrees are becoming—an important qualification. Students obtain one, because without it they’ll be unable to get an interview for most of the best jobs in the country.
And if you’re going to go back to school, now is the time to do it. Not only is the opportunity cost of the time spent extremely low—wages aren’t likely to rise any time soon, and there may not be a job available anyway—but so to is the opportunity cost of the money invested. What, you’d rather have that tuition sitting in the market right now? Or in a home?

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