THE MBA DEGREE – A PRIME EXAMPLE OF DEFERRED GRATIFICATION

Yesterday, I had two of our current MBA students in my office regaling me with the amount of time their studies were taking away from their jobs and their families. One of them said, “I barely have time to sleep most weekends I have so much schoolwork.” I didn’t tell either of them that back when I was a graduate student, I had once told one of my professors, “After my coursework, about all I have time for are church and sleep.”

The time crunch of a graduate business program reminded me of one of my favorite pieces of research conducted by Walter Mischel at Stanford in the early 1970s who devised a rather ingenious experiment with young children and marshmallows.  Here’s how it worked. Each child was seated at a table and a marshmallow was placed in front of them. The child was told that if they were able to wait 15 minutes before they ate the marshmallow, they would get a second marshmallow to eat as a bonus reward. Approximately two-thirds of the kids failed to wait the 15 minutes for the bonus marshmallow, i.e., they were unable to “defer gratification”. Interestingly, among the many studies of individuals and success vs. failure, one factor has always emerged – those who can’t defer current gratification tend to fail.

If you watch the videotape of the kids with the marshmallows, you see all sorts of behavior. Some kids pop the marshmallow in immediately with no waiting; others struggle a bit before succumbing; a few kids are in obvious agony trying to make the 15 minutes -- even banging their little heads on the table. But the simple results of the experiment were this -- one-third got the extra marshmallow and two-thirds didn’t.

Fast forward a few years and that’s when it really gets interesting. When researchers followed up with the marshmallow kids several years later, here’s what they found: if you were in the group that waited and got the second marshmallow, guess what? You scored about 200 points higher on your SATs, were less likely to drop out of college, made a lot more money, were less likely to go to jail, and had fewer drug and alcohol problems. In short, those who waited for the extra marshmallow not only looked more successful, they were more successful.

As the Mischel story flashed through my mind, I thought briefly about explaining to the two students in my office that getting an MBA, while difficult in the short run, made life a whole lot easier in the long run by opening up opportunities for more challenging jobs in the future – sort of a prime example of deferred gratification. I wanted to leave them with a few choice words that would have a big impact on their thinking down the road.  

Instead, my mind drifted back to when I was the graduate student in my professor’s office and I had just uttered the words, “….all I have time for are church and sleep.” His response was pretty straightforward (and I still remember it like yesterday) – “Well, if you think you need more time, maybe you ought to start sleeping in church…..”