Can an MBA help somehow in reaching academic positions?

Question

Very specifically, can an MBA help somehow in reaching academic positions? Or is it only for industry related jobs?

Is the combination of PhD + MBA preferred over a PhD? Does it make someone more competitive?

Answer 1

An MBA is an applied degree with little, if any, opportunity for research. However, as background for a doctorate in business (say, DBA), it could lead to a position in a department of business. I don't know how common that is elsewhere, but such departments are common in the US.

Some university administrators might also have advanced degrees in business.

Answer 2

To respond to your update and add to @Buffy's answer: In almost all cases: the answer is that it would add nothing and cost you time and money, so the overall net benefit will be negative. Think of a PhD as vocational training for researchers and an MBA as vocational training for managers. If I need an electrician, I look if that person is a qualified electrician. I don't care if that person is also a master baker.

A exception may be a business department. They need people to teach in the MBA programs, and there an MBA may have some value. Though I suspect that real life experience in business would add much more than an MBA. You may need the MBA to get the real life experience, and than go back university (however most don't want to once they have left, but that is another story).

Answer 3

From a Mathematics and Computer Science perspective:

There might be a very few cases where the department is looking for a very specific combination of knowledge, where an MBA could be viewed as establishing some needed expertise. For example, a software engineer that can also teach small group leadership could be interesting from a teaching perspective. It could also be that a department wants to hire someone in the department leadership, in which case the existence of the MBA might seen to be beneficial. There might also be a very few cases where the MBA ties into research interests in the main field.

None of these are frequent enough to justify acquiring an MBA for the purpose of an academic career.

Now, some department, especially those dedicated to excellent teaching, might look favorably on candidates with experience in the field. If an MBA was necessary in order to get the position of leadership that gives someone this experience then the MBA comes in a package that makes someone an interesting candidate. However, most prestigious teaching jobs want someone to be able to do research, in which case the industrial experience is actual a hindrance, because people stop being super-creative relatively early in their lifes. Also, people from industry might have higher salary expectations. If you are looking at a teaching oriented school, it might be interested in good student placement, in which case industrial contacts are important. For example, if you have developed successfully mobile applications, many teaching oriented schools might be interested in this expertise, as long as you can pass on this knowledge to your future students.

So, if you want a good academic career, in general and in the vast majority of cases, an MBA is not useful, especially in isolation.

Answer 4

If you have a MBA and want a university position then you could look at the universities that have finance issues .These are not uncommon nowdays .They sometimes employ staff with perceived enterprise skills to reshape income streams and cost models .

Answer 5

I posted a comment on the topic but I think it is worth expanding.

I really really hope not. Universities are not business and the kind of analysis you learn in an MBA is precisely the kind of analysis that should NOT be done in universities.

I don't think there's much of a business case to be made for - say - a program in History or program in Philosophy, but I'm sure glad my uni offers

• a course in History where students develop methods to critically assess the provenance of information and how information is usually distorted as it passes through biases sources,
• a course in Philosophy where questions of social justice are debated, especially in the context of historical discrimination.

I don't think these courses are particular popular with students and they are probably money losers, but in an age of disinformation and fake news, they are examples of inefficiencies that are essential to society. In fact the programs are probably money losers as well, yet eliminating them in the name of efficiencies would be catastrophic.

The reality is that universities are inefficient and although this is extremely frustrating it is best that it stays this way. Nobody knows for sure what important questions tomorrow will bring, so university institutions provide the necessary inertia for society to keep some latent expertise that can be called upon in a pinch. This paragraph is anathema to the ethos of an MBA; if efficiencies were taken to their logical conclusion, we'd all have "private" universities with no tenure, and we know how well that experiment has worked in the US and elsewhere.

so: I really really hope that universities would stay away from hiring people of the MBA mindset. This does not include everyone with such a degree, and does not include incompetent academics who sometimes find validation by climbing up the administration ladder. As to a point made about presentation skills: if you have an instructor (tenure-track or not) who cannot properly present the material, they should be fired. Period.

Of course our business-types will argue these inefficient faculty bring revenues through research; if there were not so many administrators maybe we wouldn't need useless faculty either.