i disagree, you can't buy or learn smarts, and business is not the same as the medical field.
if you want to start a business, use your brain to its maximum, go to the library, bookstores, online, talk to real people in business etc. that's all for free!! a business degree won't guarantee you success, but it will gaurantee a big hole in your pocket.
Spoken like someone without a business degree
There are a lot of stupid business majors (marketing, management, finance, probably economics). Then there are really useful majors (info systems, accounting, production management . . . that's about it). Do you need a business degree to run a business? No, but the fundamentals help you know what you are doing. Go to your local community college and take the intro to accounting class. That's a mandatory minimum.
I do run a business. I also do some accounting for fun. I have a lot of clients, some successful, some not so successful. I have this pizza shop, they make a kickass amount of money that makes me wonder why I don't run a pizza shop (I've done three years working in pizza). But they also signed a lease to finance their equipment that has an effective interest rate of 30%. Do the financing companies tell you that? Of course not. Can you calculate the effective interest rate of a lease? I can. You can too, if you understand the concept and know how to use a financial calculator or the finance functions in Excel (or similar). Do you know the difference between a capital and operating lease, and what the tax implications of the two are? Hmmm. Maybe you don't need to know that, that's the sort of thing you can pay an accountant for (if you bother to consult her before you sign the lease!)
I got another client, they are having trouble keeping their business, so they are bringing in an investor. That's good. What is bad is they are structuring the deal to be 100% taxable, and they have no money to pay the tax (even after the sale). Hmmm. And they want to move so fast we probably won't be able to get them to reconsider.
It's also good to understand how to cost your product (not a simple task for a recording studio). Or how your process flow needs to work. I knew one guy, an engineering type, who decided he wanted to optimize his production process by using *just-in-time* inventory. Problem was he is a very small player with no leverage over his vendors, and JIT works by forcing inventory further up the supply chain (which you know if you study cost accounting or production management). His distributors don't want to carry inventory either, and industry lead times are three months plus. So he ran out of his major product for a couple of months. Solution? Get a loan and buy four months worth of inventory! And include the cost of interest in pricing your product!
Gear . . . gear . . . gear. How many "engineers" (I use the term loosely) do a cost-benefit analysis to buying a new bit of kit? If they did, gear manufacturers would be quite a lot hungrier . . . too many "studios" are thin excuses for unmitigated hobbiest consumption of gear. High-end studios don't have a huge problem with that, because the extra-high-end stuff retains value and the vintage stuff goes up. So mainly they have to cover the cost of their space ($$$), and the interest cost of holding all of that gear. A small studio with prosumer gear that will be near worthless in 10 years has a different equation.
I have clients who have no concept of how to balance a checkbook. So they dump a year's worth of garbage on me to fix and do their tax return. It might take me ten hours to clean up their books, and one hour to do the tax return. That means their bill is 11x as high as it should be. Also, during the year they don't have a good grasp of how much money they are making, or how much tax they will need to pay.
Then I *had* clients who didn't grasp the importance of making their payroll tax deposits on time, and tried to use that money to pay vendors to keep their business going when they hit hard times. When the IRS seizes and freezes your bank accounts, it's pretty hard to stay in business.
Anyway. One accounting class, learn the basics of using Quickbooks and Excel, then go to your local Chamber of Commerce and get some free help with writing your business plan. You will find SBA loans quite a lot easier to get. Or whatever the UK equivalent of all that is.
Back to a business degree: are their dumbass business grads? Of course. But they were dumbasses before they went to college, and seven years of beer-bonging won't change that. If they paid attention, they would realize there is lots of useful stuff to learn.
