And it costs a huge chunk of cash. It's probably the biggest investment in terms of time and money that you can make in yourself.

But the people doing it seem to love the challenge and have only good things to say about the experience. It's hard to find anyone who will tell you it is a waste of time while they're doing it and fewer who'll admit it after the fact.

That said, Anne Fisher, writing for CNN Money, says she had one reader tell her he was using his MBA to line his parrot cage. She said others had called it a "joke", "the biggest waste of time imaginable", and a "confidence game".

And in case you think these people were a bunch of losers who somehow managed to scrape together enough points to pass, consider that Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business in the US, agreed with her. He said there was little evidence to suggest an MBA would enhance your career or have much effect on your salary or career trajectory. The reason is partly that there are too many MBAs in the system and demand for them has dropped - although there is evidence to suggest an MBA from the top US schools - Harvard, Wharton, Columbia and Stanford - will have companies clamouring to pay you a bucket of money.

Entry into these schools is for the absolute cream . You also have to be wealthy - these top US schools are asking in the region of R1-million for the two-year degree.

It's possible, though, that if you can make it in these schools, where the competition is vicious, you can make it anywhere.

And you will also get a major leg-up in your career from the other driven, clever and rich people you would meet there. In fact, in an analysis of questionnaires completed by 9000 alumni of top MBA programmes in the US in 2007, networking was rated the third most important reason to do the course, after increased earning potential and the education itself.

A 2002 report from MBA.co.za says people who stay within their industry after getting their degree - in other words, they are adding new skills to the experience they already have - can expect to increase their earning power by 20% to 100%.

But if you change careers and go, say, from banking into business consulting, you can expect to start at an entry-level salary, although you are likely to add value to the company more quickly than your non-MBA colleagues and so rise faster up the management ladder. Your MBA might not be a silver bullet for your career, but you will have better skills and therefore will be better positioned for success.

Julia Phipps, alumni and marketing manager at the Gordon Institute of Business Science, said the MBA makes you a specialist in general management, giving you skills in everything from team building to marketing. She said the private e-mail surveys Gibs does with its alumni showed that an increase in salary is the norm for people who get the degree - although this increase is less than it was before the 2008/9 downturn.

There's no guarantee it will land you a plum job either, but it might swing the balance your way. Laverne Hyman, a finance consultant at recruitment agency Personnel Concept, said most of the chartered accountant positions she filled had no preference for MBAs. But, she said, where there were three CVs showing similar work experiences and undergraduate degrees, the one with the MBA would land the job.

Maryanne Trollope, senior HR manager for Anglo American, said having an MBA can swing your chances of landing a job in some areas of management, but this really depends on the job's requirements. She said at Anglo they feel strongly about the school the MBA is from; she suggested that if you want to do one, you take a lot of care choosing the right place. It's going to be expensive and a lot of hard work, so you might as well get the Rolls-Royce.

In addition to the standard modular MBA, Gibs offers a one-year, full-time MBA for entrepreneurs. It is a logical fit when you consider that about 90% of start-up businesses fail and that South Africa is in dire need of entrepreneurs to generate employment and growth.

But somehow, the idea of an entrepreneur - a restless soul with a big appetite for risk - doesn't fit the profile of a typical business school student.

Phipps makes the point, though, that the course provides some of the basic principles that could make the difference between success and failure: it teaches critical skills such as how to manage cash flow, how to create an efficient value chain and how to successfully market the business. It gives the would-be entrepreneur the knowledge needed to sustain the business once it is off the ground.

The entrepreneurship MBA hasn't had time to be properly tested in the marketplace, having launched just a few years ago, but the standard MBA programme, as offered by the University of Cape Town's Graduate School of Business, has been of little use to entrepreneur Wayne Gosling, co-founder of Twangoo and now CEO of Groupon SA. Gosling said the programme was too general to be relevant to his needs and was best suited to people in fields such as engineering and medicine, who have little or no business training.

He said the MBA benefited him most through the contacts he made - he partnered with Daniel Guasco, who was on the course with him - and from the intensity of the workload in that it taught him how far he could push himself, which was a lot further than he thought.

The Chartered Financial Analyst programme has been of far greater value as far as Gosling is concerned.

Getting an MBA is not all about making money, though, or it shouldn't be. Business schools got a bad rap during and after the downturn as it was mostly MBAs manning the tiller when the US's economic ship hit the rocks.

In reaction, the Harvard class of 2009 developed a Hypocratic oath-like pledge students can take on a voluntary basis, promising to become leaders in the interest of the greater good, to "create value responsibly and ethically". Closer to home, Walter Baets, director of UCT's GBS, was adamant about changing the paradigm in business schools from attaining "value for shareholders to creating value for stakeholders". He said it was important to make a profit, but this must be done in ways that are ecologically and socially sustainable. Baets said most people taking the MBA were not in it just to get rich, they want to be successful too, and that implies doing good.