It's a mistake to think the only way to understand something complex is with an MBA.
A good example is Toyota versus the US Big 3 automakers. GM basically invented the modern American management the MBA came out of. Toyota was run by engineers. Toyota came out of the post WWII decimation of Japan to become the world's largest automaker, kicking the asses of US automakers in terms of cost and quality.
Toyota was happy to teach how they did it, and even set up a joint venture with GM, the NUMMI plant. The plant worked fine, but GM was unable to adopt the lessons. This American Life tells the tail well: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015
I think this is directly related to the MBA ideology, an important part of which is that you can take privileged people, give them a short general education covering a number of disciplines, and then make them part of the managerial caste that controls everybody else. A core notion of the MBA is that management is a universal skill. This is both historically novel and distinct from elements of the Toyota Way, which strongly honor the people doing the actual work and their accumulated knowledge.
MBA is not the only way to understand anything complex.
MBA is a good starting place to understand complex business problems. It won't make you a good engineer. And yet even engineering companies have supply chains to manage, contracts to negotiate, labour force to grow and keep motivated, finance deals to secure, multi-year strategic planning etc. I know for a fact engineers are, by and large, not good at that.
Doing an MBA won't magically make you good at that, but at least gives you a head start thinking about those problems and standard industry solutions (if you take more than arrogance and networking out of it). Similar to how an engineering/science degree doesn't tell you how to build a Tesla, but gives you the basics to bootstrap yourself from that point. Even if many a Stanford engineering grad thinks they'll build the next Decacorn because they are so great.
Lots of things give people a head start in thinking about those problems. But an MBA is a ticket to power.
If you really can't see what's controversial about giving power to a bunch of young people with a smattering of training and a very specific ideology, you haven't been looking at the harm caused. Maybe start there.
A good example is Toyota versus the US Big 3 automakers. GM basically invented the modern American management the MBA came out of. Toyota was run by engineers. Toyota came out of the post WWII decimation of Japan to become the world's largest automaker, kicking the asses of US automakers in terms of cost and quality.
Toyota was happy to teach how they did it, and even set up a joint venture with GM, the NUMMI plant. The plant worked fine, but GM was unable to adopt the lessons. This American Life tells the tail well: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015
I think this is directly related to the MBA ideology, an important part of which is that you can take privileged people, give them a short general education covering a number of disciplines, and then make them part of the managerial caste that controls everybody else. A core notion of the MBA is that management is a universal skill. This is both historically novel and distinct from elements of the Toyota Way, which strongly honor the people doing the actual work and their accumulated knowledge.