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#If You Want To Be Rich, Don t Get An MBA

Flickr via tulanesally

In her book,  "The MBA Bubble ," Mariana Zanetti, an MBA graduate of IE Business School in Spain, argues that getting an MBA is a waste of time and money. The following has been excerpted from the book with her permission.

The first thing I am going to say about wealth is that  many authors who write about prosperity and wealth  make it clear: A job will not make you rich.

If you want to be wealthy, at some moment of your life,  you will have to create a source of income other than  your salary. This is an evident and crushing reality: If  you sell your time to others, you will quickly reach a  limit in your capacity to generate income.

In his book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad ," Ro bert Kiyosaki  said that the rich do not work for money; they generate  assets that work for them. If you want to learn how to  work for money, go to school. If you want to learn how  to work even harder, you should get an MBA.

OK, some top mana gers earn millions (and they are  therefore millionaires). Some people still think they can  get to those positions with an MBA — as if the  Businessweek study. which found an  MBA does not have a causal relationship with  professional success,  was not convincing enough.

Do  you want some more proof that an MBA will not get  you there? If you look at the degrees of CEOs of the  CAC 40 (the main stock exchange index in France),  you will see that the MBA is nothing but an "optional"  degree.

In some companies, it is still desirable to  climb the corporate ladder. These companies represent  a very low percentage of the companies in the market,  and you do not need an MBA if your biggest ambition  in life is to climb to a top management position.

But let's go back to the topic that interests you: how to  be rich. If you want to be rich,  you must be an entrepreneur, investor, or both. By a  simple matter of statistics, your probability of becoming  a rock star, sports star, or Standard Poor's CEO are  very low (and believe me, the MBA will not increase  your probability of becoming a Standard Poor's  CEO).

The richest men in the world are entrepreneurs and do  not have MBAs. Many of them have no degree at all or  quit college when they realized that it was only  teaching them to be employees and to obey.

Today  these people hire the ones who have degrees. Consider  the cases of Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, Bill  Gates with Microsoft, Steve Jobs with Apple, Amancio  Ortega with Zara–Inditex, Richard Branson with  Virgin, or Ingvar Kamprad with Ikea.

And there are a  lot of anonymous rich men and women who have never  sat in a college classroom to learn how to be corporate  slaves.

An MBA may not make you rich, but it can open doors. Tell us: What do you think are the best business schools in the world? Please take our survey below.