MMS: Making Mediocre Standard

If you don’t know what the Fuqua School of Business Master of Management Studies program is, you’re not alone. Neither do recruiters at America’s top consulting firms, investment banks and the whole slew of organizations that descend on campus every Fall to handpick Duke’s annual contribution to the hopeful 1 percent.

I admit I came to the MMS program for all the wrong reasons. I wanted a way to not completely waste a year while my girlfriend graduated from that unfortunate school eight miles down the road. I had already decided that I wanted to pursue a consulting career during my four years at Duke, and I landed my dream job at the Boston Consulting Group at the beginning of the program. But for the norm, the MMS program promises big things.

The buzz phrases are everywhere. “The program is a jumpstart into the business world and a leg up on the graduating competition,” the MMS website advertises. And that competitive advantage mantra is piped into every nook and cranny of a prospective student’s brain. Simply put, attend the MMS program, and you’ll be better off than you were in undergrad. Fair enough, if only it were true.

The mean starting salary of an MMS student over the past two years of employment data is roughly $58,400. Compare that to an average starting salary of $57,000 for America’s top 10 universities according to the 2011-2012 PayScale College Salary Report. And mind you, the sample size for these schools is about 500 times the size of the MMS program. What competitive advantage is the MMS program talking about? A little over a thousand dollars? Is it right to sell that to a student who’s about to take on thousands of dollars of loans because of some false advertising?

I was shocked to learn that I was the only MMS student to ever secure a U.S. position at one of the world’s three most prestigious consulting firms—BCG, McKinsey and Bain. On the other hand, the Duke Career Center’s “Senior Exit Survey” reports Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Merill Lynch, Google, Deutsche Bank, BCG, Microsoft, ExxonMobil and Barclays Capital as top employers over the past few years. MMS doesn’t hold a candle to this.

Why?

The answer is two-fold. For one, the program aspires to make students more competitive than undergraduates, but what undergraduates are we talking about? Unfortunately, the intellectual and moral caliber of some of my MMS peers seriously calls that claim into question. They certainly aren’t among America’s best, and the Duke way is about producing the best and competing with the best. And the MMS administration perpetuates this mediocrity by fostering a milieu where landing the best possible job for your chosen career isn’t the top priority.

Duke and Fuqua administrators need to open their eyes. MMS is hurting the Duke brand.
Jonathan Swift once had a modest proposal to solve Ireland’s economic problems. In the spirit of Swift, I have a decidedly less satirical, more modest and utterly simple proposal to fix the MMS program. Make MMS admissions more selective, and overhaul the administration to actually focus on what a business education should be about—empowering students to actually get the jobs they want. If we don’t, we risk irreparably damaging the Duke brand and making this mediocre MMS culture entrenched. And that’s something no Dukie, especially this one, ever wants to see.