soupcxan said:
So now that I have my score, the MBA question is:
1) Take 2 years off and go full time at UT-Austin (top 20 by most accounts)
Cost: $40k tuition + $120k lost income = $160k
2) Part-time UT-Austin program in Houston (same diploma but not as prestigious as the full-time program? less networking opps? debatable.)
Cost: $60k, may be hard to get employer support at that price
3) Part-time Rice program
Cost: $70k, may be hard to get employer support at that price
4) Part-time University of Houston program
Cost: $25k, but likely to get employer support for some/all of it
While the costs are easily quantifiable, I don't know how to value the expected income growth from one program versus the another. If I plan to keep working in Texas, how much more is a full-time MBA from Austin worth versus a part-time MBA from Houston?
I think you're over estimating the cost of your lost income. Unless you're truly able to save $60K a year, I believe you need to take out taxes and the expenses of going to work. A more realistic estimate of your opportunity cost would be to take your 401(k) contribution, Roth, mortgage principal payoff, and whatever after-tax savings you will not be putting away and use that as your opportunity cost. You can't count food, shelter, clothing, and transportation because these are fixed costs whether you're going to school or going to work.
By the way, if you're going to do a full-time MBA program, have you considered a one-year program? INSEAD, IMD, and Cornell all have one-year MBA programs. The first two schools only offer one-year MBA programs, so they're NOT executive MBA programs. Cornell tries to sell its one-year MBA program as an executive program, requiring that you already have a post-graduate degree. They'd have to. Otherwise, they would be cannibalizing their two-year program.
If you just want to learn the finance stuff, London Business School offers a 10-month M.S. in Finance for about $50K U.S., and afterwards, you'll be right there in London, not exactly the backwater of finance. You can always read the supply-chain management, HR, leadership (or followership which seems to be the buzz word of the moment) books on your own. FYI, the LBS MS in Finance degree is what I would like to do after a couple of years in the industry.
The thing is that there are many ways to do an MBA/MS. The U.S. schools are set on offering only two-year degrees because that is the norm in this country, and, frankly, schools don't exactly have the incentive to hurry you out the door because the longer you're a student, the more you pay.