Does an MBA lead the way to career success?

Journalist Philip Delves Broughton ditched his job as the Daily Telegraph's Paris bureau chief to attend Harvard to discover what an MBA from the institution would do for him. His aim was partly to gain control of his career and partly to indulge a long-held fascination with business.

His book, What They Teach You at Harvard Business School: My Two Years in the Cauldron of Capitalism in the UK, chronicles his experiences as an MBA student and gets a glowing review from columnist Caroline Baum. But the book has been greeted with more wariness by the business school itself.

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One of less than 900 to be selected from an application pool of more than 7,000, Delves Broughton joined students on a highly competitive course where professors are known to 'cold call' students to present real-life business case studies.

Yet once you're in, it's "almost impossible to fail", Delves Broughton writes.

For people who have come from a corporate environment, it may even seem like a holiday - a student from the financial sector "did not expect to learn much but she was looking forward to sleeping, working out and taking long vacations".

Delves Broughton's own background meant he felt at a disadvantage to those with a more business experience. But he makes some keen observations on the nature of MBAs: "An MBA course tries to teach people in a classroom the lessons which can only be properly learned in the actual arena of business: valuation, negotiation, trading, hiring and firing. It also creates an ethical risk by turning the academic pursuit of business ingenuity into a goal in itself."

He is critical of the Harvard MBA tradition of grading students on a curve from best to worst, ranking people using what he views as "the very narrowest criteria".

So does he regret the two years and high fees he gave over to getting the degree? Not a bit of it. He claims it was "unquestionably" worth doing.

In writing it all down, he's offering prospective MBA students a glimpse of life behind the desk at one of the world's most prestigious business schools.

Joanna Higgins writes for BNET.co.uk.