Are MBA Degrees worth the investment?

I feel the need to go back to school to obtain a MBA. I often wonder how worth it to spend the money.

It depends on:
1) Stage of your career
If you are early or in the middle of your career, getting MBA has more value. MBA is an investment and can be expensive. It probably makes less sense to pursue your MBA if you are a year from retiring.
2) Career goals
If you want to accelerate your career, change industries, and/or change functions, MBA would be a good vehicle.
3) Intellectual curiousity
If you want to learn more about business, getting an MBA would help you learn about it.

Good luck and have a nice day!

It will befinately worth it in the long run. The higher level degree you have, the better your chance for employment and the faster your rate of advancement.

An MBA will usually cost you about 30K to complete at in interest rate of 6% (starting this summer) through Stafford and other sources.

An average MBA grad will earn about 20K more a year then someone without. Soooooo, in about a year and a half you should be able to make the money back.

Where it does not make sense is if you plan on staying within an organization that does not have a lot of vertical movement. Then you鈥檙e looking at only a modest bump in pay (5K) and some bragging rights at the water cooler.

I think that in today鈥檚 market and MBA grad with experience can command a considerable salary over most others.

For me the investment was definitely worth it. And my own ROI was one year on the 30K.

It depends. I would not expect a substantial pay raise in your current job just because you got the MBA. Some, yes, but not enough to make it worthwhile, probably. They are already aware of what you can and cannot do and what they feel your "worth" is, so unless it would make you eligible for certain promotions that were previously unavailable to you, I'd say sit tight. It's awfully hard to work and go to school - I know, I've done it.

That said, however, I think we are getting to the point where employers must require higher and higher levels of education. I don't know if it's because so many people are finding ways to pay for school, or if the universities are making it easier to graduate, but the market has been rather flooded with diplomas and it just doesn't stand out anymore. So getting your master's would certainly give you the upper edge if you were to apply for a job somewhere now. And if you were to wait several years, it would at least make you even with everyone else.