this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2026
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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
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.
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.