Acton MBA is a failed experiment
Telling the truth about the Acton School of Business is tough, but...
Since I hold an MBA from Acton, I feel conflicted giving an honest review of the Acton School of Business. Telling the truth is against my interests. But candor compels me to state bluntly: Acton School of Business is a failed experiment.
I recommend the Acton School of Business only to one group of people: those who will never need to find a job again.
Maybe after Acton I’ll never need a job again? Wrong!
Acton makes lofty promises about teaching you to be an entrepreneur and similar grandiose claims about how its graduates are all entrepreneurs.
[Digression: I suggest you should be highly skeptical about both. Ask to see solid evidence -- and don’t accept as evidence any meaningless polls of alumni with strong self-selection bias. Be extremely skeptical of rankings (ahem! Princeton Review) -- which are based solely on a survey given to current students who are strongly incentivized to make Acton sound like a great program.]
I can’t say this enough: most Acton MBA alumni go back to same company or job they had previously.
So who can be sure that they’ll never need to work for someone else again in their life? Well...trust fund kids. Plus some engineers, software developers, data scientists, lawyers, accountants, etc. Fields that currently have such a strong demand that you will always be able to find a high paying job without too much work.
If you have a trust fund (or inherit lots of money and/or connections from your parents), then I think Acton might be a great fit for you. You don’t need a job! You just need someone to give you a bit of uncertainty and be a task master so that you learn to appreciate the amazing riches that you already have. Acton might be for you.
But if you don’t have a trust fund, but do have a lucrative career: Let’s take the software developer. If you are a coder, logic suggests you should stay in your chosen field and start meeting people while looking for entrepreneurial opportunities (or go to a traditional MBA program!). There’s no secrets taught at Acton: you can find all of it easily by simply reading -- or these days, you can even pick up a good number of skills by watching Shark Tank or The Profit [for example: how much does it cost to acquire a customer? what is the lifetime value of a customer? What are your fixed costs and what does it cost you to produce one product or to service one client? How many products do you need to sell to break event?
Test your hypotheses as cheaply and quickly as possible -- good entrepreneurs are wrong frequently, they just focus on learning from being wrong.]
For the other 99% of people, Acton is terrible
If you don’t have a trust fund, nor do you have a well defined career that is lucrative, then I’d suggest that Acton is a horrible choice for you. Terrible. Awful. Ridiculous. I’m running out of adjectives.
If you have an idea of a business you want to start, then just go start it -- Acton makes you read so many cases about boat and golf companies that you will have no time to work on your business.
Instead, surround yourself with hardworking people with integrity, make sure you don’t run out of cash, and make customers happy.
If you want to switch industries by getting an MBA, then going to Acton is probably the worst MBA program to pick. If you have only a vague goal (ie, being a wildcatter, or starting a tech company, etc) then you need to go get a job in that field.
Being an Acton graduate will make it harder to find a job
But here’s the problem: an MBA from Acton will probably make it harder for you to get that job. No one has heard of Acton -- even in Austin! even in oil and gas! -- and often will assume that you couldn’t get into a real MBA program.
So you want to send a resume to HR? Forget it! Your resume is going straight in the trash in today’s economy.
You want to try to network your way into the job you want? That’s a better idea, but I hope you’re ready to do lots of explaining about . . . Acton.
As they say in politics: when you’re explaining, you’re losing.
While talking to someone about a job, they suggested that it was tough to hire me since I couldn’t get into UT-Austin’s MBA program.
Well, since you asked why I couldn’t get into Texas MBA [you didn’t, but many dozens of people have over the years]... my GMAT score was 30 or 40 points higher than the average Harvard/Stanford MBA and my grades as an undergrad at Rice were excellent. My chances at getting into UT’s McCombs should have been very high if I had ever applied there.
A quick anecdote: very early during Acton, one of my classmates talked frequently about how he turned down some prestigious MBA programs, but he felt Acton was worth the risk. He had a very clear criteria: he would judge the success of his decision based on whether he A) got a job in Austin, B) in a different industry than what he’d been working in previously, and C) with at least a slight bump in salary.
Six unemployed months after graduation, he finally found a job. It was far from Austin, in the same industry, and from what I understand was less salary than pre-Acton.
Acton School of Business’s employed at graduation statistics are awful
At least 20% of the graduates of my class were unemployed for at least a year after Acton.
The vast majority of Acton grads go back to their old jobs if they can get them back or go back to similar jobs after spending a few months unemployed post-graduation. There are not many other employment options when you have an MBA that people assume is from a degree mill.
Almost no one switches industries and I don’t know of anyone who A) immediately made more money after Acton or B) immediately started a successful business. To be fair, I assume that there must be a few graduates who do fall in those categories, but they are not common.
Acton School of Business: A failed experiment to disrupt higher education
This is all so disappointing because Jeff Sandefer clearly wanted to disrupt higher education. (I’m into that. It’s necessary!)
Sandefer probably taught 30% of all of the classes for my year, and he talked constantly about how higher education was being disrupted and at risk of widespread bankruptcies. Even when it had nothing to do with the case at hand, he could not stop himself from talking about the inevitability of higher ed institutions going bankrupt in the next 5 years.
It’s been 4 years -- colleges and universities are still doing just fine.
But now that you’ve read my post, you probably know why Acton MBA hasn’t disrupted higher education: Sandefer still doesn’t know what MBA students want and hasn’t listened when he has been told.
One of the first rules of entrepreneurship is to know what your customers want. So far, Acton has failed to do that, and that’s why it is a failed experiment.
[This post has been updated and edited over the years.]
UPDATE, August 2016: This blog post got mentioned in Poets and Quants and then in Fortune.
UPDATE, Feb 2017: I recommend reading my classmate Treye Denton’s response. He is significantly more positive overall, yet his takeaway remains:
I agree with Evan: I cannot recommend Acton as a good option to anyone who doesn't already have a strong direction in what they want to do. You are risking a year of your life on a program that has shown absolutely no ability to produce either entrepreneurs or even advance people in their careers.
UPDATE, Feb 2021: There is no longer an Acton MBA, though the Acton School of Business still lives. I guess they eventually had to agree that Acton MBA was a failed experiment!
Now rebranded without the accredited MBA as Acton Next Great Adventure, it appears to largely be the same program, if abbreviated. When I checked it looked like all the original teachers who were entrepreneurs have quit and it’s a bunch of semi-successful alumni who now teach the program. However, the program is now much cheaper.
