Meet the enemy of the MBA Josh Kaufman, 28, is a self-proclaimed "independent business educator." By John A. Byrne, contributorOctober 4, 2010: 2:07 PM ET (poetsandquants.com) -- If Josh Kaufman had gone to business school, he probably would have graduated this year with an MBA from Harvard or Stanford. But Kaufman, a 28-year-old entrepreneur and former assistant brand manager for Procter & Gamble, thinks business school is pretty much a waste of time and money. MBA programs, he says firmly, have become so expensive that students "must effectively mortgage their lives" and take on "a crippling burden of debt" to get what is "mostly a worthless piece ofpaper." Kaufman believes that MBA programs "teach many worthless, outdated, even outrightdamaging concepts and practices." And if that's not bad enough, he insists that an MBA won'tguarantee anyone a high-paying job, let alone turn a person into a skilled manager or leader. In an era when MBA bashing has become almost fashionable, Kaufman is emerging as business school's most unforgiving critic. Founder ofPersonalMBA.comand the author of the forthcoming book "The Personal MBA," he's a passionate advocate for what he calls self-education. Instead ofpaying up to $350,000 in tuition and forgone earnings to go to Harvard, Stanford or Wharton, Kaufman says a better way to learn business is to open the pages of classic business texts and learn on your own. His epiphany occurred five years ago, when he was working at P&G ( PG, Fortune 500) headquarters in Cincinnati as an assistant brand manager for the company's Home Care division. He had joined P&G straight from the University of Cincinnati by virtue of the school's cooperative education program. Almost all of his peers and managers boasted elite MBA degrees.
