Two semesters into a top EMBA program, I walked away.
Not because it was hard. Not because the cohort lacked substance — the people in that room were among the sharpest I have encountered in fourteen years of building across international markets. I walked away because I did the math. And the math stopped working.
That decision cost me. The sunk cost was real. The social friction was real. The quiet fear of a career-ending mistake lasted longer than I expected. But I have learned, across a decade and a half of shipping products in real conditions, that the most expensive thing you can do is protect a bad bet because you have already paid for it.
A business school dean published a piece arguing that AI makes the MBA more necessary, not less. I read it with genuine attention. This is my response.
The Promise
The EMBA sells three things: curriculum, credential, and network. The first is available elsewhere at a fraction of the cost. The second is under growing pressure. The third is what institutions protect most — because it is the hardest to disprove from outside.
The pitch sounds like this: you will be surrounded by exceptional people, founders and operators and executives from across geographies and industries. This part was accurate. My cohort contained people I respected, people I would trust with a hard problem.
What the pitch omitted: impressive people under shared duress, united by tuition payments and case study deadlines, do not form a functioning professional network. They form a temporary community. The relationships feel close during the program. After it ends, most dissolve into the noise of connection requests and conference corridors.
I paid a significant sum — the kind that reshapes financial plans across years — and found myself two semesters in with a credential I questioned and relationships whose depth remained untested.
The institution delivered what it promised. The promise itself was the problem.
A Different Experiment
While still enrolled, I took a Maven cohort course on product strategy. One course. A few hundred dollars. A room — virtual, real in every way that mattered — of practitioners building and shipping in live conditions, not studying decisions that had already been made.
The network I found there was different in kind, not in scale. These were people who replied to messages. Who sent leads without being asked. Who shared real problems without the performance that proximity to prestige generates.
Within six months, two of those connections had become collaborators. Within a year, one had introduced me to an opportunity that redirected my trajectory.
I cannot run a controlled trial on a single life. But I can read what the evidence tells me: specificity of interest builds stronger networks than proximity to prestige. You do not need to share a tuition bill. You need to share a real problem.
The Argument Deserves a Fair Hearing
The dean's position is not frivolous. It deserves the careful reading I gave it.
The case goes like this: as AI absorbs the analytical layer of business — the modeling, the synthesis, the structured output — the scarce resource becomes judgment. Who to hire. Which market to enter. When to hold a position under pressure. These are not algorithmic outputs. They are the product of experience and exposure to consequential complexity. Business schools, the argument goes, are designed to develop all three.
This is a coherent position. The problem is what it omits.
These are institutional leaders whose revenue model and professional identity depend on the premise that their programs produce what cannot be produced elsewhere. That is not a disqualifying conflict. It is a relevant one — and it deserves to be named before the argument is evaluated on its merits.
The dean may be right that judgment is the scarce resource. But a direct financial interest in the answer to where judgment forms is not a neutral starting point for the inquiry.
Where Judgment Forms
Here is the question the institutional argument avoids: where does judgment form?
The institutional answer: in a rigorous environment, under intellectual pressure, surrounded by complexity. Case discussions. Simulations. Debates with cohort members who have built companies. Exposure calibrated to develop the kind of thinking that scales.
But judgment does not form in proximity to complexity. It forms in contact with it.
Fourteen years of building products in real markets built judgment that no simulation can replicate. Features that failed in front of real customers. Organizations where consensus was fiction. Resource calls made with incomplete data and no answer key. The case study teaches you to analyze a decision someone else made. It does not place you inside one.
The market is beginning to price this distinction. Entry-level consulting hiring — the traditional post-MBA on-ramp — fell 25% from 2023 to 2024 and has continued its slide. AI is now performing the analysis junior MBAs used to bill out by the hour. Starting salaries have flatlined in real terms for three consecutive years. Workers with demonstrated AI skills earn 56% more than peers without them — up from a 25% premium twelve months ago.
The judgment premium is real. The institution claiming a monopoly on developing it is not.
What I Am Building Instead
I am moving back to India. After years across international markets, I am returning to build in one of the most consequential technology environments in the world.
The decision to leave the program is not one I perform or celebrate. It was expensive. It carried real risk. But the belief that institutions are custodians of judgment — that a building and a cohort and a case study library separate leaders from the rest — does not survive contact with the alternative.
The alternative is rougher. Less legible to hiring systems built for a world still being dismantled. But the network is alive. The learning compounds against real problems. And the cost is a fraction.
If you are enrolled in or weighing a top EMBA, I am not urging you to leave. I am asking one thing: before the decision is final, find someone who built without the credential and someone who built with it — and ask them not what the degree cost, but what it changed.
That answer is worth more than any brochure.