Is an Executive MBA Worth It? Part III
Spoiler Alert: It’s hard to quantify and mostly personal.
Because when it comes down to it, most things are personal. That’s a sign you’re human.
If you didn’t read Parts I or II, you can go back and do that now. Otherwise, here are the Cliff Notes:
There are an infinite number of opinions about whether an Executive MBA is worth it (infinite since people like me are always adding to the discussion).
The answer to whether an EMBA is worth it depends on your goals—professional, personal, and educational. The expectations of employers and the job market can also matter.
If you’re looking at a break-even analysis as a data point in your decision process, be sure you understand how a school’s published ROI/break-even point was calculated. It’s not always as straightforward as it would seem.
Assuming the degree will move you in the direction to which you aspire and the break-even point is satisfactory to you, it’s time to think about the worthiness of an EMBA on a more personal level.
THE PERSONAL EQUATION
The quick and dirty break-even point analysis involves the cost (tuition out) and the benefit (compensation in). A more thorough and personally meaningful analysis will take other things into account, and I would encourage you to give them serious thought and be honest with yourself about the impact a grad school program will have on other parts of your life. Here are some things to think about:
Most EMBA programs require about 20 – 25 hours work/week. How is that going to affect your current working situation? Do you know your job well? Is your team strong enough to operate when you’re unavailable?
What will you have to give up in order to take on this commitment? What are your non-negotiables? How will you prioritize them? Consider the following: promotions at work, fitness, finances, hobbies, family life, sleep!, social activities, community involvement, vacations, volunteer work, etc. Any of these could be on the chopping block when you’re in grad school.
How will the pressures and demands of an EMBA program impact the relationships with the people in your life who are supporting your graduate school endeavor? Do they understand the sacrifices you (and they, by extension) will need to make? Do you have a plan in place to deal with conflicts when they arise? If not, can you create one that benefits everyone or at least mitigates the strain?
THE REAL ROI
While the cash breakeven will be closer to a hard and fast number, the true ROI of the EMBA degree is tangible but exceedingly hard to quantify even for the “non-squishy” elements (I’ll get to the squishy part shortly).
NON-SQUISHY ROI: Hard to Quantify but Tangible
Non-squishy ROI #1: Take Your School to Work
One of the most overlooked hard-and-fast benefits of an EMBA is the “ROI Starts Day #1” impact it has on your current role and work situation. Unlike traditional 2-year (or part-time) MBA programs where a lot of the learning is conceptual, EMBA programs focus on the application of concepts in your own work environment. As a student, you will often take what you learn in a weekend class back to work on Monday, bringing value to your employer (which you can bring up at performance review time) and making you a more valuable employee (which you can bring up at performance review time). What ambitious professional wouldn’t want to take advantage of that? Let me know if you find one.
Non-squishy ROI #2: Classroom Discussions
Class discussions that take place and what (and how much) you learn from classmates is a hallmark of Executive MBA programs. Hearing how another company handles a situation or uses the concepts you’re currently learning about is pure gold. Not only that, but bringing up an issue you’re facing at work during class will inevitably generate numerous suggestions and offers of assistance from your classmates. A common sentiment among EMBA graduates is that they learned as much from classmates (and sometimes more) as they did from professors. What would that kind of learning be worth to you? If you’re not sure, check out the cost of a really good career coach (which won’t be quite as costly as an EMBA but also not nearly as fun, among other things).
Non-squishy ROI #3: New Opportunities and Benefits
Compensation isn’t just your salary + bonus; it can include a whole bunch of things. Let’s say your EMBA leads to a new job where the pay is the same as your current one but the opportunities for professional growth are enormous, or where the parental leave benefit is much better than the one your current employer offers. What are future opportunities worth to you now? (That equation is called the Net Present Value and if you don’t know how to calculate it now, don’t worry. B-school will fix that.) What will the more generous parental leave benefit mean for your family? Both situations represent tremendous intrinsic value (don’t worry if you don’t know what that is; you’ll learn it in your finance class). Neither of those examples or others like it will be part of a program’s stated ROI/break-even point calculation but they will definitely be part of yours.
Non-squishy ROI #4: The Almighty Network
Many programs advertise that as a graduate, you’ll become part of and have access to their world-wide alumni network, and together, you’ll establish world peace or whatever. Personally and in general, I think the importance and value of a school’s alumni network emphasized by programs is somewhat inflated, more so at some schools than at others.
If you’re in doubt, perform the following experiment: check your own alma mater’s alumni rolls and identify three people you think might be helpful in addressing a need you have (because this is why we reach out to alumni, right?). Call/email them and see what kind of response you get. Note: this doesn’t apply to grads of Penn State, Notre Dame, or USC.
I could be wrong but I think you’d be lucky to get one reply. It’s not necessarily that alumni don’t want to help; you may have caught them on a bad day or they may be too busy, and their warm feelings about their alma mater aren’t going to change that. But it could also be that they’re one of those loathsome types who’s made the calculation in their small minds—before ever talking to you—that there’s nothing in it for them. And you know how that goes.
The cynic in me says the real network benefit accrues to the school since you will become part of their potential future donor network when you graduate and as an alum, you will be contacted frequently.
However, you will never have a better professional network than your specific EMBA classmates. Why? Because you’ve spent two intense years together and your relationship, both business and personal, developed organically. You know what your classmates do for a living, you know what opportunities they might be interested in, you know what their areas of expertise are and who to call when you need help with a specific problem, etc. Better yet, you have access to their networks which are always growing, just like yours. Sometimes all you need is an introduction.
SQUISHY ROI: Hard to Quantify, Very Real, and Deeply Personal
The best—and I’d argue, the most important—outcomes/rewards of completing an EMBA program don’t come til the end, which sucks for impatient people. Moreover, they’re completely amorphous so you can’t assign a monetary value to help you with your ROI equation and doesn’t that just figure: here you are with all these kick-ass financial skills and you can’t even use them.
The first of these outcomes is what you learn about yourself. As an adult, there are very few situations (barring things like summiting Everest or raising children) that can thoroughly test you or give you the chance to prove your mettle, especially to yourself. An Executive MBA program is one of them. You will be challenged like you have never been before—intellectually, psychologically, emotionally, physically, even spiritually.
What separates this challenge from others you may encounter around this time in your life is that unlike raising children which is totally unpredictable, you probably had a lot of really solid data or at least a pretty strong idea about how difficult the endeavor would be and you did it anyway.
Once you finish, you’ll feel—and it’s not untrue—that there isn’t a whole lot that life can throw at you that you can’t handle. (Yes, that last sentence should go on some dumb inspirational poster.) I don’t know what that kind of confidence is worth to you but my guess is that if you could package it up and sell it, you’d be very wealthy indeed.
The second best/most important takeaway from an Executive MBA program is the forever friendships you’ll develop. As a program recruiter, I never focused on the “amazing friends you’ll make” as a selling point because…duh. You go into a program expecting that you’re gonna meet some cool people with lives and goals similar to yours. What you don’t know yet is how much and in what way they’re going to change your life. Suffice it to say that it’s going to be a lot, and probably in ways you never imagined.
It's not until it’s over and you’ve had time to reflect that you can assess the value of what you just went through (and survived!). Over the course of my experience working in Executive programs, I’ve met hundreds of EMBA graduates and every single one I’ve ever asked says the degree was worth every single dime, and they’d do it again in a heartbeat.
Sounds like a two-thumbs-up situation if you ask me, even if it can’t be quantified and fed into a Monte Carlo simulation. (Don’t worry if you don’t know what that is; you’ll learn it in business school.)