For reasons that don't bear repeating here, I am forced to use msn.com as my homepage when I log onto the internet from my office. Usually, I click past the features that Microsoft has passed off as "news" and go wherever it is that I was trying to go. But occasionally, the teaser headlines give me pause. Today was one of those days.

Today's headlines included a box entitled "Strictly Business", with the following links to helpful business-related articles:

- PDA or cell? Best tech tools for biz trips
- Top-selling US cars
- Work-at-home tips
- MBAs: hotter than ever

I recalled hearing something recently about how studies have suggested that an MBA is in fact not worth the money it costs to get one, and so I was intrigued by the last article. I clicked the link to read about "MBAs: On the Rise", thinking that perhaps the studies I had heard about were flawed, or had been challenged, or something. I was surprised, therefore, to find the following disclaimer, just after the headline: "This article is brought to you by The Princeton Review, a sponsor of the College and Grad pages on Encarta.com." Hmmm.

I read the article. Typical, but not surprising, given the sponsor, is the following quote: One thing is certain: No matter what the economy is doing or what kind of money people are making, an MBA will always provide a student with more knowledge, experience, and networking capability. There was no source credited for this bold statement. Arguably, it simply restates the accepted wisdom, so no source is necessary.

Except for one thing: a number of studies, including one by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the accrediting organization for US business schools, say that the conventional wisdom is untrue. And as I recalled, these studies are not old news, either: the July 2002 issue of Business 2.0 reports that a number of studies, among them reports by the AACSB, Stanford Business School professor Jeffrey Pfeffer and Chicago Business School professor Ronald Burt, have concluded that there seems to be no correlation between MBAs and career enhancement. One study noted that in a survey of MBA graduates, a majority of the respondents said that the skills that are most useful in the real world -- one on one communications, managing change and listening skills -- are not taught even "moderately effectively" at most business schools.

MSN, by the way, reported none of this. Now, anyone who bases his or her decision to get an MBA based on one article on MSN.com sponsored by Princeton Review is acting with questionable judgment and doesn't deserve much sympathy in the first place, but this example does raise the larger question of the objectivity of information on sites like MSN, Yahoo and other "destination" homepages. Previously, I have seen alot of discussion about this issue in the context of search engines' "sponsored links" (and the FTC has said that it may require better disclosure of sponsored links), but relatively little about it in the related, but separate, context of "sponsored content."

To its credit, MSN did mark the article as a paid advertorial -- but only after you clicked on the "news" headline. Still, I have to wonder, since the article appears on the site for Encarta, Microsoft's electronic encyclopedia: What other information in the encyclopedia is shaped by its "sponsor"?