The Harvard MBA says:

It is true that classroom learning is generally considered the least important aspect of business school.  After all, I doubt that business school would be nearly as popular if it didn’t put its students on track for hefty compensation packages and fast-track careers (often aided and abetted by the help of older alums).

On the other hand, the classroom learning is important, especially if you didn’t serve a stint as a management consultant prior to b-school.

Harvard Business School explicitly tries to provide a broad business education.  This includes teaching everything from functional skills (we have to learn accounting and finance, sales and marketing, and even how to most efficiently set up operations in a machine shop) to people skills, to business history.  I have two undergrad degrees, and worked for a famously intellectual employer (D. E. Shaw), and most of what I learned was completely new to me.

The nature of the education is also important.  HBS teaches using the case study method, where you have to extract relevant information from a relatively unstructured narrative.  While case studies are still much easier to parse than the real world, they teach you how to look for patterns and determine what is and isn’t important.

Many of my friends and the entrepreneurs that I advise have commented that I’m good at listening to their situation, then focusing on the one or two factors that matter.  This pattern-matching definitely owes something to the hundreds of different business cases I studied at HBS. (In all fairness, I’ve always been good at word problems in math, and often wondered why other students found them so difficult)

In the end, if you’re choosing between two years of business school and continuing to work, it really depends on your situation.

If you want to go into banking or consulting, or if you are trying to transition from the military or the non-profit world into business, b-school is an outstanding choice.  It will give you a broad business background, and recruiters will be lining up to hire you.

If you’re a former McKinsey consultant who wants to write a novel, b-school will be a fun albeit pricey 2-year vacation.

For me, I’d say that I got about 1/3 of the value of HBS from the actual classroom learning, 1/3 from networking, and 1/3 from the alumni network (I didn’t bother doing any recruiting, since I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and didn’t want to waste my time interviewing for jobs I’d never accept).

For more on the value of an MBA, check out my older post, “MBAs are not BS“.