Hey folks, welcome back to my weekly newsletter.
I get asked "When should I do an MBA?" at least a dozen times a week, so I thought I'd write an edition for anyone sitting in that dilemma.
It’s strange because when I was making the same decision myself, nobody asked me the one question that actually mattered.
They asked which schools I was targeting, what my GMAT was, whether I'd get in abroad but nobody asked why I wanted to do it, or why right then.
I went anyway, to Wharton, and it worked out.
But the question everyone skipped is the one I now think decides the whole thing, and it is the one I want to hand back to all of you asking me.
It is also why I think the noise around this question has gotten so loud, with almost everyone in it arguing about the wrong thing.
You have probably seen Nikhil Kamath’s clip which said that if you are 25 and doing an MBA, you must be some kind of idiot.
Half the internet cheered.
The other half, mostly people who sell these degrees, lined up to defend them.
Both sides are measuring whether the degree is worth the money, is the ROI there, has AI killed it.
But the MBA was never the variable. You are.
Here’s what we are trying to gLook at where the strongest programs set the bar.
Among the Financial Times' top global MBA programs in 2026, most students have 4–6 years of work experience, with an average of about 5.3 years across the top 20 programs.
That's not a strict requirement because MBA lessons make much more sense when you've already spent a few years solving real problems at work and can connect the concepts to actual experience.
With only two years of work experience, business cases often feel like interesting stories. With five years of experience, they feel like real problems you've faced yourself, making the lessons far more practical and valuable.
The same applies to your classmates.
So, before asking the question of which school, ask whether you have something for the degree to multiply.
Which is where I think Kamath is half right, and wrong about the half that matters.
He is right that doing an MBA at 24 to escape a boring job is a mistake but not because of the age.
Being bored, or stuck under a bad manager, is a real problem and is a cheap one to fix. You can change teams, change companies, or have one honest conversation about what isn't working.
None of that costs tens of lakhs and over a year in time.
Remember that your age was never the problem.
The same person who would waste an MBA at 24 running from something can get enormous value from it at 28 running toward something simply because of where they are in life.
So if you are sitting where I was, there are really only three reasons that justify it.
Engineer to product, analyst to a leadership track, a full change of industry.
This is the one thing an MBA does better than anything else, because it buys access you cannot get otherwise.
Recruiters at McKinsey, Bain, and BCG hire in cohorts from B-school campuses and are not equally accessible through messages / applications online.
I did my MBA at Wharton. The classroom was useful. But what I carry from those two years is the people: the batchmates who are now VCs, founders, and CXOs across three continents.
You have enough behind you to know that is the direction you want, and the MBA is the next lever of growth.
And do the maths the brochures leave out.
Ensure you consider more than the fees, think about the two years of income you give up, plus the raises and promotion you'd have earned by staying.
The top Indian programs are excellent and most graduates don’t have to worry about the above when they get a seat in these, but a mid-tier one entered with no clear reason is where people end up with real debt and a modest bump, and those are the stories that hand Kamath his point.
Hit reply: if you are thinking about an MBA, what is the real reason underneath it?
I read every email.
Swati
PS: Despite Kamath’s comment on MBAs, Zerodha ended up hiring our student Anurag Bansal : )