The George Washington School of Business

(You knew this was coming…)
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, I had an absolutely traumatic experience at the George Washington School of Business (MBA program). Granted, I was going through a number of difficult transitions at this particular point in my lifetime, but let’s just say that this ranks near the top of my all-​time worst decisions.
Without getting into the laundry list of higher ranked schools that I turned down to go here, I’ll instead focus on practical points that should clearly focus on why this school is a disaster. From a pedagogical standpoint, this school is at best insufficient and more accurately described as insulting. For example, I had one professor teaching a New Venture Initiation class who had ZERO experience in new ventures. In other words, at least one of her students (me) had more experience in that field than her. While the professor was certainly a nice person, it was an absolute travesty to have her teaching the subject. Another professor commended the use of mark-​to-​market as an alternative methodology for creating financial statements. The use of the word «creating» is intentional here because it was used in the context of teaching young minds to «cover up» losses. While I understand teaching mark-​to-​market for other purposes, I found the ulterior motive here to be troublesome and ethically compromising.
The entire teaching style was driven towards allowing one to effectively become a corporate drone. I once remarked that the type of work we were doing is what I would have assigned to my paralegal; nothing during my experience at the school changed that reality. It was extraordinarily disappointing; I had come to business school to buttress my legal education with master’s level education from a nationally recognized university. What I received was lessons in project management.
The level of incompetence was widespread. It attached to every level of the organization. The business school was going through major change and renovation at that time — they changed directors, recruiters, and buildings all in a period of one year. Ironically, the business school did not seem able to meet the changes in their environment.
Unless you are doing a joint degree, there are zero circumstances where I can actually recommend this experience to anyone. I wouldn’t recommend it to you even if I hated you. Chinese water torture would be a more preferable fate than spending another day in a useless class in GW’s MBA program. Don’t make my mistake. If you are getting an MBA, go to the proven commodity. Don’t make misguided steps based on a foolish attempt to save something that was already dead.