this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2026
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A long while ago, I was considering taking an MBA, until I talked to my friend's dad of Iranian ancestry.
I did not bring it up, in the middle of an unrelated conversation he just dropped that he was disappointed that his kid(bordering 40s) was not a PhD, and how MBAs are ruining the world.
Every single people of Persian ancestry I met in my life takes education very seriously, maybe not so much the younger ones as they only aim for a master's degree and hurt their parents feelings. :P
thats asian upbringing to, they expect you to be MD/ Law which is a doctorate, or a scientist, or one that has a high income. any other jobs they will constantly compare and keep complaining every single time.
The OP also included zero information on what these guys have their PhDs in. Iran is a theocracy, so at least some of them are likely to have doctorates in Islamic theology or Sharia law.
I don’t know about Iran, but India also loves academic titles. They are very easy to get and often just mean you have to pay for them. I have Indians with multiple masters degrees, that knew less than someone with a bachelors degree from a European university.
Business degree is worse than nothing imo. All the debt, all the indoctrination, very little exposure to anything potentially educational or enlightening. Come out of a program like that as a certified yes-man with bills to pay, the shame it brings to your family is just the tip of the iceberg
The indoctrination is the enlightenment. You're gaining the ability to recognize what your senior peers in business consider valuable and reflect those values back to them.
What do you think the PhD board is screening for in Iran? You are as much learning the cultural touchstones and taboos as the specifics of the field. Academic institutions all have their own orthodoxy, their own dogma, and their own heresy. Some of this is the product of accrued trial and error. Some of it is purely ideological - a matter of personal persuasion handed down from master to student, which must be adhered to if one wishes to be recognized as a full member of the institution.
It isn't that simple. Yes-Manning works if you can find a billionaire (or an Ayatollah) with an ass that needs licking. But eventually people have to actually do shit.
What Trump's team has mastered is the art of the grift. They aren't merely yes-men, they're confidence men. They've all become exceedingly wealthy based off their ability to rook their peers.
What the Guardian Council of Iran's team has mastered is navigating the space between religious orthodoxy and practical politics as an upstart surrounded by wealthier rival states. They have been dancing through a mine-field for 47 years and now they can't dance any further.
So it is still very much an open question of who comes out ahead, even if the US has proven disastrously inept at getting the short-term high-profile domestic media wins that the current president demands.
I took a few MBA graduate level courses because a job was paying for them. The professors really didn't like it when you trash the entire premise they are trying to teach.
Now the economics professor was fun. He had a better understanding of statistics and the inherent data integrity issues, biases, and heavy reliance on correlation that plagues the field.
MBA programs aren't about the classes or any kind of academic rigor. They're almost entirely networking plays: go get an MBA from a high ranking program, where you will drink with new friends you've made at different events, and then learn socially how to fit in with these MBA types, and then everyone gets their first post-MBA jobs at a big 3 consulting firm where they'll do a bunch of stuff with executives of Fortune 500 companies, get to know execs who will vouch for them when the next VP position opens up. Then, 20 years after getting their degree, they still have an address book and text message threads with a lot of people who just happen to be the who's who of senior management in different industries. All made possible by the MBA program, none of it coming from the coursework itself.
Knowing how to network and how to leverage a network are key skills to running any business.
High level education is a form of social reproduction, the world over. We have moved away from strictly family-oriented hereditary management and adopted a broader ideological basis for transferring political authority and private ownership.
Case in point, Kushner, graduated with a JD/MBA dual degree program at the New York University School of Law and New York University Stern School of Business in 2007. He interned at Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau's office, and with the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison. He's a New York Business Deals Guy, which is why he ran in Trump's circle and ultimately married his daughter.
Similarly, Vance earned his JD from Yale in 2013, then spent his early career working for perennial Texas Senator John Cornyn and chief justice of the Eastern District of Kentucky circuit court system. To say he's uneducated would be absurd. He is in a direct pedigree with a long line of far-right apparatchiks.
All these Iranian diplomats went through a similar matriculation in their younger days. They've been promoted as much due to their loyalty to the project of Iranian independence as their raw educational background and attainment of certification.
What do people think someone with a PhD did to earn the degree? What do people think someone promoted to a C-level position at a major corporation or partnership at a ranking law firm did to earn the post? You might be surprised to discover the degree of overlap. Much of it boils down to standing up in front of a board of your professional peers and proving you're able to discourse with them at an equivalent level.