I've got a couple coworkers trying to steer me towards business school (MBA, not undergrad), and they said that the real value is the network of classmates that you develop. The courses basically consist of reading lots of case-studies - if you read a lot, you probably do that or the equivalent anyway. But you can't fake the experience of getting a lot of smart, successful people together.
I found that that was also the primary benefit of going to a top private college. My courses at Amherst weren't all that much better than those at a good state school - yeah, they were challenging, and the professors were good, but if you look hard you can get that at many other universities. But almost every single one of my classmates is doing something interesting, whether it be physics grad school or traveling abroad or running a hedge fund or eliminating child soldiers in Africa or writing Broadway musicals or starting a company with me.
You can get most of that info elsewhere, though. I have no formal education in finance, but I understood everything in the Sowood letter, even without Marc's commentary.
(Really, sometimes I think that money managers would do well to read Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor and nothing else. Many of the complicated mathematical stuff - which my employer makes a business of selling - actually hurts your performance in the long run.)
"the real value is the network of classmates that you develop."
True unless everyone knows it: what happens when nobody is there to learn and everyone is there to network? A network that doesn't transmit any content (and exists mostly to network) is useless.
I found that that was also the primary benefit of going to a top private college. My courses at Amherst weren't all that much better than those at a good state school - yeah, they were challenging, and the professors were good, but if you look hard you can get that at many other universities. But almost every single one of my classmates is doing something interesting, whether it be physics grad school or traveling abroad or running a hedge fund or eliminating child soldiers in Africa or writing Broadway musicals or starting a company with me.