Jason:<p>I need to set aside a good hour to flesh out these ideas, but the first ideas that come into my mind:<p>- Adverse selection: most of the people in any MBA class have profiles that are at the polar opposite of entrepreneurship, valuing social approval and jumping into hoops someone else designed. A class is a very tight environment where the prevailing ethos tends to take it all. Hence even potential entrepreneurs are steered away. Remedy: change class profile --hard.<p>- Self-assurance: in top MBAs, people are continuously told they are the best of the best. The opportunity cost of entrepreneurship is then artificially inflated and the relative contribution of other profiles (developers, designers, salesmen) implicitly undervalued. Remedy: stop doing this, but then how to justify a 200k fully loaded cost?<p>- Hindsight: business school curricula are alla bout descriptions and not about predictions. All business cases are written with a massive amount of hindsight. There's the illusion of being able to explain what has happened, but no out-of-sample fit whatsoever. Explanations are sought in outside factor and not in assets such as individual talent, small teams and morale. Business school curricula the polar opposite of what Hackers & Painters is about.<p>- Skills: the curricula are slaves to student requests: they get easier and easier, grades don't matter, and hard skills that could be learnt (stats/machine learning, quant marketing, programming, sales) are not. A lot of people graduate with no significant skills whatsoever. Remedy: hormetism in business school curricula.<p>- Bubble: for many people, an MBA is a 2-year vacation that is designed to be as removed from the real world as possible (most people worked terrible jobs 100 hrs/wk and will return to do so). There's no amount of real-world work that you can do for credit during the school year.<p>- Faculty: same as studentry, it's an incredibly tight group where the dominant philosophy wins. I believe many consider MBA sections as an ensemble are demotivated jerks to be done with as soon as possible, to return to research and undergrads willing to work their asses off. Also, most tenured professors are out of touch with entrepreneurship and these are those who grant tenure to the upcoming guys. Young stars who try to do something radically different are pretty much alone and have to do superhuman efforts for a payoff that might very well be negative in terms of their career. Remedy: I have no clue.<p>Unfortunately, an MBA is a somewhat marvelous machine that pockets a lot of money (often leveraged) to provide students a socially-accepted way to spend two years out of the world while convincing themselves they are special <i>because</i> they are in the program, without any need to show special work. The real magic is tapping into a corporate system that miraculously provides six-figure jobs at the end, apparently validating the whole concept. Firms like Goldman or McKinsey follow the exact same proposition, expect substitute "pockets a lot of money" with "pockets a lot of time".<p>Disclosure: I graduated with an MBA from Wharton a month ago. I worked part-time at Etsy during my second year and am now working at Squarespace in NYC. The business school failure at teaching entrepreneurship (or, at large, how to build things) bothers me as much as you, and I'd like to fix this, as I have a hunch that an MBA class has a lot of people who could, if trained, go on to build valuable things.