Will the real MBA please stand up?

(cross-posted from the June 2009 Deans Digest)

Are holders of an MBA degree responsible for the global financial crisis, interested only in making money, and devoid of ethics and a sense of social responsibility?

If you listen to some critics, MBAs exist only for their own financial gain—and are solely responsible for the current recession. However, in real life, their motives are a lot like everyone else’s. In a recent survey of MBA graduates that GMAC conducts annually, the top criterion for selecting a job was the opportunity to do challenging work. Salary was down the list at number six.

Responses from management education graduates also revealed that the key driver of the value of their degree is the ability to develop their knowledge, skills, and abilities, not how much money they will make.

We also surveyed more than 2,000 companies that hire MBAs—from small to multinational—around the world and 98 percent said they were satisfied with their MBA employees. In fact, this hiring season these companies paid an MBA about 50 percent more than someone with an undergraduate degree.

To be sure, the deep economic recession is affecting every industry and companies have significantly curtailed or withdrawn hiring plans for all types of jobs. MBAs are not completely immune: Companies in the survey said they would be hiring, on average, about half the number of MBAs this year, compared to last year.

There is some good news for those with an advanced degree in business. Despite the doom and gloom, a greater percentage of graduates in 2009 had received a job offer compared with economic downturns in 2002 and 2004. More than half of the students in the survey who were seeking jobs in the manufacturing, energy, and health care industries had a job offer.

According to the Department of Education, about 125,000 people receive a master’s degree in business every year in the US. Only a very small percentage of this number goes into investment banking and works on Wall Street. Most are working for companies, nonprofits, government, and all types of organizations in between to help their employers succeed. And many today are entrepreneurs, applying the skills and knowledge that they developed in their MBA programs to their own company.

But whether they work on Wall Street , Main Street, or Pennsylvania Avenue*, we can be proud of the vast majority of MBA graduates who are committed to leading ethical and socially responsible lives. April was TeamMBA Month and dozens of b-schools around the country organized a variety of service projects to give back to their communities.

From repairing and renovating houses for low income residents to helping establish a program to develop entrepreneurship skills for prison inmates, thousands of MBA students across the country are contributing their time, skill, and enthusiasm in a collective effort to give back and make our communities better.

One student we spoke with summed up his, and his fellow students’, involvement this way: “We have people that are very ambitious, that want great positions in great companies, but along with those traits … we also have those that are very interested in giving back to the community. You can be ambitious and give back to the community at the same time.”

And MBAs certainly have done their share.

The real MBAs are right there in your community, living, working, and contributing in ways that we all can be proud of.

* Secretary of Education Arne Duncan earned his MBA from the Booth School at the University of Chicago and Former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell earned his MBA from George Washington University. President George W. Bush is a Harvard MBA.