Is Getting an MBA Embarrassing Now?
A Week Inside Tetr's Bet on the Future of Indian Education
In collaboration with Tetr Masters Program
You’re in a room with a billionaire who could buy your entire current (and probably future) net worth as a rounding error, and he’s talking about MBAs the way people now talk about Blackberry phones- with the mild, almost affectionate contempt reserved for things that made sense once and don’t anymore. You’re nodding. Your phone is in your pocket, and on it, if you opened it right now, is a screenshot of an admit letter to an MBA program you’ve been dreaming of attending for the last 4 years.
You don’t open your phone. It sits like a stone on your chest, and for a minute, you struggle to breathe.
Ambition in your twenties is weird. The gap between the thing you’re working towards and the thing that actually matters has a way of revealing itself at the worst possible moment. You spent years building toward something, and somewhere between the application and the admit, the goalposts have shifted. You arrived at your destination, but the people you were hoping to meet have left. They’re on stages, laughing about how your long-awaited inflection point doesn’t count anymore. Your ambition is now their punchline.
A few years ago, Vogue UK ran a piece asking whether having a boyfriend was embarrassing now, and the reason it spread the way it did was that it articulated something awkward: that wanting the expected thing had started to feel embarrassing.
The MBA is getting the same treatment. And so is everything else you were told to want. The title, the package, the relationship, the five-year plan. There’s a phrase for what this generation is collectively experiencing right now, and it’s not burnout, it’s not a quarter-life crisis, it’s not anxiety, though it can look like all three. It’s destination fatigue. The exhaustion of having followed directions carefully, arrived where you were told to arrive, and found that the people you were trying to impress had already moved on to somewhere else entirely.
The MBA is just where destination fatigue is most visible right now. It’s the most expensive destination to reach, and the most public one to question
In 2024, approximately 23% of Harvard MBA graduates were unemployed three months after commencement. At Indian business schools, placement figures that used to be the entire point of the marketing have gotten harder to locate on annual reports. Surveys put nearly half of MBA graduates in India as unplaced in their graduation year.
These are the programs that were supposed to translate your ambition into something the market could reliably process. Unfortunately, the market itself has stopped being reliable.
Here I should tell you something about myself, because it’s relevant: I went to Lady Shri Ram College, and later to Tsinghua University as a Schwarzman Scholar, and I have no illusions about what those names did for me or what doors they opened without me having to knock. I am an absolute beneficiary of institutional access.
What I’m interested in is not whether credentials matter. Of course they do. What I’m interested in is this specific, strange moment where the credential that was supposed to remove uncertainty has started, itself, to feel uncertain.
What do you do when the translation service you were depending on to navigate a new language breaks down when you’re still mid-sentence?
Srishti Gupta, who is the director of the Masters program at Tetr, described traditional management education to me as “a socially acceptable pause button.” Pausing is a fantastic thing to do, in my opinion. The issue is that you need to know you’re consciously pressing pause. I think that a lot of people who go into MBA programs don’t. That ambiguity was, of course, part of the appeal. The degree was designed to absorb uncertainty: it gave you access to institutional infrastructure while you figured out what your future looked like, and then created a pipeline to that future by throwing structured resources at you.
What’s broken now isn’t the desire for that access. It’s the outcome of the access itself. The MBA still absorbs uncertainty. What it no longer reliably does is resolve it.
Most of us come from backgrounds where credentials are a proxy for permission. If you didn’t grow up surrounded by founders or family friends who casually raised capital at thirty, the MBA was the door that the world had agreed to leave unlocked for people willing to work hard enough to reach it. It offered a seductive premise: one of a correct sequence. If you followed it, the world would make space for you. You may not get everything. But you will land a job that your parents could brag to your relatives about.
That promise mattered enormously. For first-generation professionals, people switching careers from backgrounds that would get filtered out by ATS resume scanners, people for whom a name-brand admit was the first credential they had access to, people who didn’t come from access or privilege, the MBA carried a satisfying heft.
I have never done an MBA. What I have done is spend years making choices I then had to explain at length. I have written the LinkedIn posts. I know the particular mental gymnastics of making a decision and then immediately constructing the story that makes it make sense to other people. And I know the exhaustion of explaining yourself so many times that you can’t quite remember why you took the said decision in the first place.
Shahrose Bhat, who has spent years working directly with young people as they navigate what they want to build and who they want to become, noticed the shift not in rankings but in the questions students were asking. “Earlier,” Shahrose said, “the question was which brand name opens doors. Now, it’s what can I actually build?” He’d watched high-performing students turn down elite admits to go somewhere where outcomes mattered more than logos.
This is not a rejection, I think. It’s a renegotiation to demand access to proof.
“Proof of work” has become the dominant frame in the language of anti-credential ambition. It’s the idea that seriousness is no longer asserted in advance, but inferred backward from what you’ve already built. It’s the residue that real work leaves behind.
Sarthak Kaul, who leads program delivery and outcomes, put it plainly: over sixty percent of resumes look identical now. Titles without numbers. Frameworks without evidence of decisions made when something was actually at stake. What distinguishes a candidate, he told me, is clear ownership.
It makes obvious sense because credential inflation is real and pretty simple: when a signal becomes widespread, it stops being distinguishing. An MBA once placed you inside a small pool; now it places you inside a very large one, all the people you share the pool with speak the same language, learn the same frameworks, and have completed variations of the same assignments, studied vaguely the same cases. Scarcity creates value. The MBA is not scarce.
But “proof of work” has developed its own performance problem. The hustle content, the polished martyr-founder LinkedIn, the I quit my job and built this from a notebook in Bali post. This aesthetic of productive struggle has become exactly as formulaic as the credential it claims to replace. Except it’s harder to see through, because at least the MBA is still giving you a real credential. The “building in public” performance, on the other hand, can look indistinguishable from real building from the outside, while being substantially nothing.
More uncomfortably, the proof-of-work credential carries its own gatekeeping problem, just a less visible one. The twenty-three-year-old whose parents can cover rent while she tests a business idea has a fundamentally different relationship to “early contact with consequence” than the one for whom a failed venture means having to move back home and fend off marriage talks. I learned so much from that failure is a sentence that only sounds profound when there’s a safety net underneath it. When there isn’t, the failure is just a failure, and the lesson is a material cost
This is where the time I spent at Tetr comes in.
The program works like this: students are placed in real operating environments. Shanghai, then Dubai, then Madrid. They build actual ventures. They work with real suppliers. Deals collapse. Teams fragment. Their investment money can run out. The consequence is real.
Tarun Gangwar, Co-Founder at Tetr, told me that the program was built around a specific observation: that most education systems are optimised to produce people who are very good at being students. Excellent at reading a room, figuring out what’s being asked for, and delivering it. Which is a useful skill, he said, until you’re in a situation where nobody is asking for anything and where you have to generate the question and the answer simultaneously. “We wanted to build an environment where the default mode of operating was initiative, not response.” That’s a harder thing to teach than any framework. It might be impossible to teach in a classroom at all. So they stopped using classrooms as the primary unit.
Here’s what makes it structurally unlike anything I’ve seen in business education: grades are replaced by revenue. Success at ‘assignments’ is generating revenue, and if you couldn’t, explaining why. The faculty aren’t (just) academics with research portfolios; they’re CXOs, operators, founders, and practitioners. These are people who have made the wrong hiring decisions, rebuilt supply chains under pressure, and have honed a sense of taste and judgment that doesn’t come from a syllabus. Learning happens through the friction of trying to sell something to a customer who does not care how good your thesis was.
Ayush Jain, who works on curriculum design at Tetr, described what most programs do as teaching people “how to sound right before they’ve had to be right.” That sequence, he said, matters more than we admit. And that is fundamentally what a traditional MBA does, right? A key feature of mid-management is articulation arriving before accountability.
One student I spoke to, twenty-two, sharper than she was letting on, described the moment she stopped thinking of what she was doing as learning. She was in Dubai, mid-negotiation with a supplier who’d changed payment terms overnight. Full prepayment or no stock. She had five hundred dollars and one viable sales window that week. “There’s no framework for that,” she told me. “There’s just: what are you willing to live with?”
What struck her wasn’t the decision itself or whether it was correct. It was the sense of honesty that came with it. “Everybody stopped posturing,” she said. “When something real is on the line, no one performs anymore. You’re all just trying not to make the wrong call.”
Several students from the first cohort of the undergraduate program have gone on to raise funding for the ventures they started during the program. These are businesses that existed before they graduated, with customers and revenue already attached to their names when they walked into any room. Others have been hired directly by the operators and CXOs who taught them, not through a placement process but because those people watched them work under pressure for months and made an offer. Amitoj, Head of Careers of the Undergraduate Program, told me the career conversations look different too. “They don’t come in asking what opportunities are available,” he said. “They come in with a track record. The conversation starts in a completely different place.”
Sejal Srivastava, from Tetr’s founding team, calls this the difference between intellectual risk and real risk. “In a classroom, the downside is interpretive,” she said. “You can be wrong and it’s just an interesting lesson to learn. Here, the lesson is financial, reputational, real. You can’t hide inside good arguments.”
I believe her. I also believe this might not be the best thing for everyone. There is a real psychological cost to being wrong early and publicly, and that cost is not equally distributed across temperaments, financial situations, or family expectations. Students who come from environments where a public failure carries family-level weight are not in the same program experientially as students for whom a failed venture becomes a war story they tell at their Series A fundraise celebration. Tetr is filtering for a specific relationship to uncertainty. That filter is not neutral, and the program is most effective when it acknowledges that rather than papering over it.
Jessica Varghese, who works closely with Tetr students on their student experience, told me the thing she hears most isn’t a fear of failure. It’s a fear of irrelevance. It’s the fear of realising the world has been moving without you while you were inside a seminar room arguing about a case study from 2014. Failure feels temporary, she said. Irrelevance feels permanent.
I think this is the real truth underneath the MBA anxiety, more than the placement stats or the credential inflation. Students aren’t just calculating financial return. They’re asking whether the path moves them closer to the person they’re trying to become. The return on self is slowly becoming the new ‘return on investment’. A degree structured around deferred contact with consequence can’t always make a promise of that return.
The MBA was always a bet on a particular kind of future. You delayed. You invested. You trusted that what came out the other side would give you legitimacy to navigate the world you want to be a part of. That bet worked when the future was stable enough to bet on. It works less well when industries reorganise faster than syllabi update.
Ambition still exists as concretely as it always has. What has altered is the tolerance for delay in the presence of ambition.
And there are two genuinely different kinds of people trying to navigate this, who need genuinely different things, and we do both of them a disservice by pretending the paths are the same.
The first person uses the MBA well. They know exactly what they need it to do. They’re making a specific career switch, targeting a narrow set of organisations that recruit through predictable pipelines, or they want structured time to think without immediate consequence, which is a legitimate want. They don’t want an MBA that changes their life. They want a degree that makes it easier to live in the one they have.
The second person is incapable of walking a straight line.
This person has usually already tried the straight line. They took the internship, got the return offer, sat in the first year of the job and felt the low-grade dread of being good at something they don’t care about. Or they watched someone two years older do exactly what they were planning to do and felt, looking at that person’s life, not inspired but warned. They want to know what they’re actually made of before someone else decides for them.
These people are smart. Restless. Increasingly aware that what the MBA is optimised to deliver isn’t quite what they want. They want proximity. Friction. They want to find out whether their instincts hold before the stakes are so high that being wrong is no longer something you can recover from publicly. They are not walking away because the MBA is beneath them. They’re they’re because they suspect it might not be enough, or worse, that it might give them the illusion of growth without facilitating any.
Rayan Irani, who works with Tetr students through their operational phases, told me the hardest adjustment isn’t technical. It’s psychological. Students keep looking for the right answer. They’ve been schooled, literally, in the production of correct answers on demand. Eventually they realise there isn’t one. There is only the decision they can live with, given the constraints they have and the information they don’t, and the willingness to own it when it turns out to be wrong.
The geographic structure is designed to accelerate this realization. Dubai compresses speed through go-to-market pressure and sales windows that close whether or not you feel ready. Shanghai confronts students with the humbling enormity of supply chains and negotiations that they have to learn how to do in real-time. Madrid adds brand, culture, customer psychology.
Dubai teaches you that speed is a skill, not a personality trait. Shanghai teaches you that your assumptions about how business works are largely assumptions about the West, and that finding out otherwise while a supplier is changing terms on you is not a comfortable classroom. Madrid teaches you that customers are not rational, that brand is not an afterthought, and that the gap between what you think you’re selling and what someone is actually buying can be the difference between a business and a hobby.
Ayush described the three-city structure not as a curriculum decision but as a deliberate destabilisation. “Every time a student starts to feel settled, like they’ve figured out how things work, we move them,” he said. “The feeling of having figured it out is usually the moment right before you stop learning.” The discomfort of arriving somewhere new, of having to rebuild your operating assumptions from scratch, is, he argued, the whole point. Most education tries to reduce that discomfort. Tetr is trying to raise your tolerance for it.
Moving through these three contexts trains what I’d call contextual adaptation: not just global exposure in the résumé sense, but the ability to notice which of your instincts travel across markets and which collapse the moment your underlying assumptions change. That is not a minor skill to develop at twenty-two with money on the line.
Verdicts are, I think, what got us into this rhetorical mess. The “MBA is dead” crowd needs it to be dead so their alternative looks more attractive. The “MBA is eternal” crowd needs it to be eternal so their investment looks more secure. Both are defensive. Neither is quite telling the truth.
Here is what I actually think: the MBA has moved from default to decision. From the structure that stands behind you to the structure you have to stand behind. A traditional MBA could hold many kinds of ambition without asking you to specify which one you were carrying. That elasticity is mostly gone. The MBA now works best when you know what you’re using it for, and that requirement for clarity is exactly what makes it feel, to people who don’t yet have it, slightly exposing.
If what you want is coherence, which might look like a bridge through a career switch, or time to think without immediate consequence, the MBA can still do that. There is genuinely no shame in wanting the structure. Most of us have wanted exactly that at some point and just called it something else.
If what you want is proximity to industry, early contact with consequence, feedback that arrives before you’ve finished theorising, the chance to find out whether you can actually operate before the stakes are unrecoverable, then the sequence has to change. Responsibility has to arrive earlier. The learning has to happen inside the pressure, not in preparation of it.
Tetr is built for the second group. The students I spent time with weren’t anti-education. They were, if anything, more hungry to learn than most. They just wanted to learn the way it actually teaches them what happens when something real is at stake. They wanted genuine consequences for getting it wrong.
There’s an obvious question I’ve been skirting, and I want to answer it directly: if the MBA is the wrong call and building is the point, why not just go build your thing? Why pay for a program at all?
It’s a fair question. Most people who say “just start” are talking to someone who already knows what they want to start, already has a co-founder or a network or a family situation that makes failure something you can bounce back from, or someone who already has enough context about how businesses actually work that the first six months won’t be entirely wasted on avoidable mistakes. That person exists. She is not the majority. The majority of twenty-two-year-olds who want to build something don’t yet know what, don’t have the market exposure to make an informed bet, and don’t have anyone in their corner who has done it and will tell them the truth when they’re wrong. “Just start” is genuinely good advice if you have all of those things. It is moderately useless advice if you don’t.
What Tetr is offering isn’t a replacement for starting. It’s a compressed, structured version of the first two years of starting. You start with capital, with real markets, with peers who are in it alongside you, with practitioners who will tell you when your thesis is wrong before you’ve spent eighteen months on it. You still get the credential at the end, which matters in contexts where credentials still matter. But you arrive at that credential having already shipped something, having already been wrong and having faced consequences for it. The question isn’t Tetr versus just building. It’s Tetr versus building alone, without structure, without feedback, and without the peers who are also building right next to you and will notice if you’re coasting.
The embarrassment around MBAs is a signal. It’s the LinkedIn post that keeps getting longer and when you’re watching someone two years younger than you ship something real while you’re still in a seminar room preparing to be ready. It’s your ambition telling you that the path you’re on and the person you’re trying to become are not quite moving in the same direction.
The billionaire in that room wasn’t wrong, and neither are you for wanting what you wanted. The problem was never the destination. It was that the map was drawn by people who’d already arrived somewhere else and handed it to you without mentioning that the terrain had changed. Destination fatigue doesn’t mean you stop moving. It means stop moving toward things you chose at twenty-one because they seemed like the right answer to a question the world has stopped asking.
The gap between where you are and where you actually want to be is real, and what fills it is entirely up to you.
Some people will close it with structure. They’ll seek a degree that gives them the bridge they need. That’s a real answer and a legitimate one.
Some people will close it by stepping into something before they feel ready, which is to say, immediately. By choosing the environment that doesn’t protect them from finding out what happens when their decisions have real consequences. By deciding that the most important thing they can do right now is accumulate contact with reality and not the simulation of it.
Tetr exists for the second group. It is not for everyone, and it doesn’t pretend to be. It is for the person who read this essay and felt, at some point, that they were being described. The person who is tired of making choices they are supposed to make and wants to start making ones that feel aligned to their idea of growth. The person who doesn’t want to spend two years preparing for the real world and would like to find out, now, what they’re actually made of.
If that’s you: the capital is real, the markets are real, the teammates are real, and the question — what are you willing to live with — is the only one that has ever mattered.
The next cohort is open. Find out if it’s for you at www.tetr.com.
Just read the title so far and I feel like starting a self help group for fellow MBA folks🤣