Great post, MP!In keeping with your post's theme and tone (and on my own tangent here), it seems that many posters on this board figure all they have to do is pick to the right school, the right major, etc. and I'm "in like Flynn". You should see the agony in many of these posts as the posters try to reduce the problem of obtaining gainful employment to merely academic credentials, MBS versus MSc versus PhD, etc. These people obviously don't have much experience in the job market, or they'd have a broader perspective on what it takes to be successful. Education is just one aspect. I find this more common with Germans (maybe Europeans in general?) since they spend so much time in school that by the time they get out they are in their upper twenties and have to real world experience, only theoretical experience. There's so much more to being successful in one's chosen field, and knowledge and skill acquisition are only a part of it. Just because you went to an Ivy league school, have 2 advanced degrees, etc doesn't mean you'll get that dream job. And on the flip side, if you didn't go to an Ivy League school then you are not assured a career life as a janitor.If you dont' have good contacts, have the social skills of a tree stump, and lack persistence and drive, then no amount of schooling will compensate for this.

One of the few refreshing posts of the forum, besides Business School A v. Business School B, as has so often been seen here...In my opinion, there is a continous demand/market for managerial talents as much as technical talents in various fields. Managers (represented generally by MBA graduates) and technically-oriented finance professionals (MSc Finance graduates or PhD quants) in general, have different markets. I won't say one is superior/inferior to the other.However, the key aspect of your posts upon which I agree is work experience (v. educational qualification). I'll only talk about finance masters and careers here. I'm more familiar with MSc Finance courses, and I feel that among various courses throughout Britain, the general coverage of basic financial theories is similar - although elective subjects tend to give these courses their respective characterisitics. My belief is when someone starts his/her career, the qualification (school reputation, result, etc.) becomes less important. I've yet to experience this when I graduate from this finance course. However, having worked as a civil engineer (whereby a graduate needs to take with him/her even more theories into his/her career than finance!), my belief in the importance of qualification just disappeared. Your boss, your colleagues just don't career about which university you come from any more! Your qualification doesn't help you complete your projects skilfully any more! And I have a 1st Class in Civil Engineering from Imperial College!The point is, rather than fussing about which school is better known to the world, focus on the actual syllabus. See if it's relevant to your career objectives, compare these with those from another school. At the end of the day, you have to work, and this is when others see if you are genuinely good! Your qualification simply gives you the tool to compete, and the competition starts when you start working. It's a totally different story, though, at PhD level.

MP - I have to say that was a very coherent post. I think you have nailed one of the main reasons why people whose main skill is the ability to talk to other people will continue to get rich for a long time.I do feel I must weigh in on why someone with quantitative skills can be more than just a tool to be used by an MBA.The best way for getting any given piece of information at the micro level is to interact directly with the individual person or firm. But the human brain has serious limitations on the amount of information it can store and the accuracy with which it can process that information. Building a mathematical model means you are giving up specificity and replacing it with some general assumptions (losing high frequency part of the signal, or however you like to describe it.) However, you gain scope in the sense that you can see much more of the market at once, and you gain power in the sense that you can find patterns which are not easily recognizable through simple intuition and linear approximation.There is always a trade off of this nature, even within quant modeling. A tension exists between people who want a model that is easy to understand and operates in the same way as their intuition (mostly traders, portfolio managers, other end-users), and people who want a model that is consistent with theory and perhaps elegant in formulation (many academics fall in this camp.)In short, while many of us look at the MBA coursework and think "I could do that," we should also realize that the value of something like an MBA degree is not measured in terms of academic learning.