Patrick Bet-David just made the case to millions of people that the MBA is in trouble. He is right — and the data backs him up even more thoroughly than a single clip can.
In the video he points to a Wall Street Journal report — a "fire sale on MBAs" — and stacks up the evidence. The number of MBA programs in the US grew roughly 69% between 2005 and 2021, even as placement softened across the board. Three months after graduation, he notes, 21% of Duke's MBAs and 15% of Michigan's were still without a job; Harvard's no-offer rate climbed from 4% in 2021 to 23% today; even Wharton — the gold standard — went from 1% to nearly 7%. He cites a survey in which 40% of employers say they do not plan to hire MBA graduates this year, points to pullbacks at Amazon, Google, Microsoft and McKinsey, and lists programs discounting hard: Purdue down 40%, UC Irvine 38%, Johns Hopkins 50%.
It is a sharp diagnosis, and we agree with the thrust of it. We would add one thing: the fire sale is the symptom, not the disease — and once you see the disease clearly, the path forward is genuinely optimistic.
A discount is a symptom. The tell is in the salaries.
If the MBA were simply oversupplied — too many degrees, not enough buyers — you would expect the price of the graduates to fall alongside the price of the degree. It has not. Over the same years that no-offer rates spiked, starting pay for the graduates who did land stayed at record highs: an average base near $187,000 at Stanford, $170,000 plus a $42,000 signing bonus at Northwestern's Kellogg, $175,000 at Dartmouth's Tuck.
Our own read of the employment reports confirms the placement story, with its precise shape: Harvard's share of job-seekers still looking at three months went from 10% for the Class of 2022 to 20% in 2023 to 23% in 2024; Stanford roughly doubled to 18%; MIT Sloan went from 5% to 13%; Kellogg tripled to 13%. And — worth saying plainly — the Class of 2025 rebounded, with Harvard back near 90% placed. The headline number swings. The pattern underneath does not.
Rising no-offer rates alongside record salaries is not the signature of collapsing demand. Collapsing demand pushes price down. This pushed price apart — some graduates clear $187,000, others send a hundred applications into silence. That is not a market that stopped wanting MBAs. It is a market that can no longer tell, from the credential alone, which graduate is which.
What actually broke: the signal
A credential is a promise made to someone who cannot see your work — trust this, and you can skip checking. For decades the MBA was an almost perfect version of that promise; the letters alone moved you to the front of the queue. What the last few years exposed is that the promise stopped predicting the outcome. When the average no longer tells a recruiter anything reliable about the individual, the signal weakens — and discounting the price of a signal the market trusts less does not make it more trustworthy. It only makes it cheaper to acquire.
Bet-David's prediction is right — and worth finishing
The most interesting part of the clip is his forecast: companies, he argues, will become the universities — offering MBAs in-house, taught by executives, built on real case studies from people who actually run businesses rather than theory from the lecture hall. We think he is directionally right. The future of the credential is learning by doing on real-shaped problems, with the proof attached.
There is one piece his version leaves out. A corporate MBA taught at Amazon or McKinsey is a benefit for the people those companies have already hired. It rewards the candidate who has cleared the bar; it does nothing for the student still standing in front of it. It leaves the hardest question untouched: if the degree no longer proves you can do the work, how do you prove it before someone gives you the job?
Learning by doing belongs before the first job, not only after it
This is the caveat the education-and-industry debate keeps circling without naming. Universities are built to teach how to think; industry increasingly wants to see what you can do. Neither is wrong, and neither is going away. The missing piece sits between them: a place where a student can do real-shaped work and have it independently verified — without needing to be hired first to earn the chance.
Framed that way, learning by doing is not a replacement for the degree or a threat to the university. It is the complement that closes the gap both sides have left open — proof of work that travels with the student, earned while they study rather than handed out after they are hired.
Where Ewance fits
That conviction is the whole reason Ewance exists. Students solve challenges that relate to their field of study and earn verifiable certificates for the work they actually produce — a portfolio of demonstrated problem-solving rather than a claim about where they spent two years. The challenges are built to mirror the kinds of problems real work throws at you, so the proof maps onto what an employer actually needs. And recruiters get to do the one thing a weakening credential no longer lets them do: discover the people who can do the work, and verify it for themselves.
Bet-David is right that the MBA is on sale, and right that real work is what comes next. The opportunity is bigger than a corporate perk: it is the chance to let anyone willing to show their work prove it — long before they need the job to do so. The credential is not dying. It is being rebuilt around proof. For students ready to demonstrate what they can do, that is very good news.
Sources & notes
The program-level figures, the employer survey, and the corporate-hiring claims above are as presented by Patrick Bet-David in the embedded clip (which cites a Wall Street Journal report); we present them as his. The placement and salary figures we state in our own voice are drawn from the school employment reports and coverage below. PBD's scholarship figure differs between his video (32% to 47%) and the post text (32% to 49%); we cite neither as established.
- Harvard Business School — Class of 2025 Employment Report. https://www.hbs.edu/mba/blog/class-of-2025-employment-report
- The Harvard Crimson — "HBS Graduates Face a Tougher Job Market." https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/2/6/hbs-employment-rate-drop/
- Poets&Quants — Harvard Business School Class of 2025 Jobs Report. https://poetsandquants.com/2025/12/02/harvard-business-school-class-of-2025-jobs-report-offers-rebound-pay-soars/
- Entrepreneur — "MBA Grads From Top Schools Struggling To Find Work." https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/mba-grads-from-top-schools-struggling-to-find-work-report/487846
- Fortune — Harvard MBA graduate outcomes 2025. https://fortune.com/2025/12/02/harvard-business-school-mba-graduate-outcomes-2025-record-salaries-shift-to-entrepreneurship-tech-jobs/
- e-GMAT — "The Dichotomy of MBA Employment: Rising Unemployment, Solid Salaries." https://e-gmat.com/blogs/the-dichotomy-of-mba-employment-rising-unemployment-solid-salaries/
- Moneywise — "MBAs are going on sale." https://moneywise.com/news/top-stories/mba-tuition-discounts-business-schools-ai
- GMAC — "The essential lowdown on MBA scholarships." https://www.gmac.com/resources/learners/how-to-apply/scholarships-financing/the-essential-lowdown-on-mba-scholarships
