So the tuition is free because alumni donated money to an endowment to make it free and still pay the finance professors the going rate required for a quality PhD in finance to chose to be a professor vice the other options available to them. Money the alumni presumably feel they earned because of their MBA, otherwise they probably wouldn't have chosen to donate to that particular cause. So at least for them, it had pretty significant value. Most of the alumni at my school donate significant amounts as well and the endowment size is almost ridiculous, so all of us obviously feel the MBA was worth a lot. If it wasn't worth anything, none of us would have money to give to those programs, would we! As the saying goes, money talks, BS walks.
