By Prof Rahul Nainwal, Senior Director, School of Business, UPES and CEO, Runway Incubator

Every few months, someone announces the death of the MBA. The reasons are familiar. It costs too much. AI is eating entry-level jobs. You can learn it all on YouTube. And if you are about to hand over ₹20-30 lakh, surely a mutual fund and a job would do better. Let compounding do the networking.

I am the head of a business school, so discount what follows by whatever percentage you think fair. But the critics are not wrong about everything. I just think they are asking the wrong question. Instead of “Is an MBA worth the money?”, I would ask what the degree is meant to do for a career, and whether we have built it for the world that person is about to walk into. Most of us haven’t. Not yet.

ROI matters, but it is only the opening bid

Any prospective student should start with return on investment. It is an expensive bet. The Financial Times puts average MBA tuition at around $107,000 and average salaries three years after graduation at around $161,000.

The trouble is that we treat ROI as a two-year spreadsheet. A career runs thirty or forty years. An MBA can change its direction: the industry you enter, the function you move into, the people you know. Those effects compound long after anyone remembers the first pay cheque. Not every MBA pays off, and a mediocre programme at a premium price is a terrible investment. Watch the first job, by all means. Just don’t stop there.

The pure generalist is having a rough decade

For a long time the MBA was the generalist’s degree. Breadth still counts, but breadth without depth is worth less than it was. A doctor who understands hospital economics, or an oil and gas engineer who can steer a business through the energy transition, already has a domain, which is very hard to teach in a classroom. The MBA adds the business layer. We see this at UPES, where our specialist programmes are full.

The MBA’s quiet superpower: permission to switch

The degree survives for another reason that rarely shows up in ROI calculators: it gives people permission to change direction. LinkedIn’s 2026 analysis of leading Indian business schools found that roughly two-thirds to seven-tenths of alumni at several of them had moved to a different broad industry. The degree doesn’t make anyone competent in a new field overnight, but it is a bridge: a new vocabulary, a new peer group, access to recruiters, and a respectable reason for an employer to take your call. Think of the engineer who wants to be a product manager, or the founder who built on instinct and has just discovered that cash flow is not a feeling.

What AI is really changing

AI isn’t killing the MBA. It is dismantling the apprenticeship that used to make the MBA valuable. A young graduate once spent years building models and decks. The work was slow, and the slowness was how people learned. Now much of it takes a fraction of the time, and the 2026 GMAC Corporate Recruiters Survey found that one in three employers has already replaced some entry-level roles with AI.

So AI may make the MBA more valuable and less valuable at once. Less, if the degree trains people to do tasks a machine finishes before lunch. More, if it trains people to decide which problem is worth solving, to cross-examine an AI’s answer, and to persuade fifty people to act on it. Employers stop being impressed by a first-cut analysis and ask what you can do with it. Can you convince a sceptical CFO? Own the decision if it goes wrong? We call these “soft skills”, which is a terrible name for the hardest part of the job.

Perhaps the problem is the two years

If technology has shortened the time it takes to learn business foundations, two full years in a classroom is hard to defend. ISB’s one-year programme and IIM Ahmedabad’s PGPX already attract experienced professionals who won’t sit out of the workforce.

I would go further. Make it a 12-month MBA, followed by a structured apprenticeship of six months or more inside a company, a startup, a consulting assignment or a family business. I don’t mean the internship where you spend two months formatting someone else’s slides. I mean a real problem, a real manager, a real P&L, and real consequences, assessed as seriously as any course.

Students are ahead of us. At our school, demand for live consulting and startup projects is high. One alumnus of our MBA in Strategy and Consulting, run  in partnership with KPMG, was picked by Big Four firm.

Honestly, live projects are messier than a case study, and the grade is harder to defend. I would still rather give students that mess than another semester of slides.

So no, the ROI debate shouldn’t bury the MBA. It should force us to build a better one: not with a bigger syllabus, but with better judgement, sharper questions, a network, and the habit of using AI without handing our thinking to it. Leadership isn’t made in 500 hours of lectures. It comes from doing hard things with other people and living with the consequences. The best MBA of the future won’t be the longest one. It will be the one that changes a career the most.