In 2025, at a YouTube AMA marking Zerodha’s fifteenth year, Nikhil Kamath said something that travelled further than most lectures ever will: “Colleges are dead. If you are 25 and going to an MBA college today, you must be some kind of an idiot.” The shorthand version is blunter still. All the knowledge is on YouTube now, so why pay for it?
It is a good provocation, and good provocations deserve better than a reflexive defence. The fair move is to ask what Kamath is attacking, and then ask whether anyone who has thought hard about management education was ever defending that thing to begin with. So let me not rush to the barricades for the MBA. Let me start with his target.
What Kamath is actually attacking
Reduced to its load-bearing claim, his argument runs like this. The point of an MBA is to acquire knowledge and a credential that lead to a good job and a higher income. Knowledge is now free and everywhere. The credential no longer returns enough to justify what it costs. So the MBA is irrational.
Everything hangs on that first sentence. And here is what almost everyone arguing about Kamath has missed: both sides have accepted it. His critics defend the MBA as a route to placement and salary. His admirers attack it as a poor route to placement and salary. They are quarrelling over the return on the same investment, having quietly agreed on what the investment is for.
But what if that premise was always the weak link? What if the people who built management education, on their better days, were never defending it on those grounds at all?
A question I once put to a student named Aayan
Four years ago, before generative AI had pushed the cost of knowledge close to zero, I wrote a Socratic dialogue for an incoming MBA batch. It is reproduced in full at the end. A student named Aayan falls asleep wondering why he is doing an MBA, and wakes, in his dream, in front of Socrates. His first answer is the one everyone gives. Management education is essential for a good job and for promotions.
Socrates takes it apart. Lawyers, accountants, and engineers get good jobs and promotions too, he points out, so a good job cannot be the thing that makes management education distinctive. Then he says something that, reading it again in 2026, sounds as if it had Kamath in mind:
“Suppose your chances of getting a higher placement after two years of experience are 40%. By pursuing management education that increases to 45%, would we say enrolling in management education has made me a better professional? If it were so, everyone going through management education would become CEO.”
That was the case against treating placement as the goal of an MBA. It was made by someone inside the system, three years before the man now famous for attacking it from the outside. Which raises an uncomfortable question for the whole debate. If the placement-and-salary justification is this weak, why are its defenders still leaning on it, and why is its loudest critic still swinging at it? Kamath and the dialogue agree on the demolition. They part ways only over what is left standing in the rubble.
The KASH question
What the dialogue finds in the rubble is a frame some teachers call KASH: Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, Habits. Knowledge is what you can look up. Skill is the ability to put it to work. Attitude is the inner thing underneath both, what you value and how hard you will push for it, without which the knowledge just sits there. Habits are what keep you learning, unlearning, and relearning when the world refuses to hold still.
Lay Kamath’s claim against that frame and a question more or less asks itself. Which letter of KASH has YouTube actually made free?
The K, mostly. Some of the S. Knowledge has been democratised, and a student who thinks an MBA’s value lives in its lecture content has every right to feel cheated. On that student, Kamath is correct. But notice where this leads. If knowledge is the cheap part, was it ever the part worth paying for? If the answer is no, then free knowledge is not an argument against the MBA at all. It is an argument against a thin, impoverished idea of the MBA, the exact idea the dialogue spends its length pulling apart.
Which leaves the question I would put to a prospective student, or a parent, or a dean. Can Attitude and Habits be built off a screen, alone, at your own pace, with the comments turned off?
Where judgement comes from
I will not answer that for you. The method forbids it, and besides, you will trust an answer you reach yourself far more than one I hand you. But let me describe something I have watched happen many times, and you can decide whether YouTube can do it.
A case lands in front of forty students. There is no answer key. One student commits to a decision and has to defend it, not to a professor but to thirty-nine peers who read the same pages, reached different conclusions, and will go after every soft spot with the particular ruthlessness of people about to be judged themselves. The rigour is not in the case. It is in the room. The student finds out, live and in front of everyone, which convictions survive a sharp question and which fold. That is not knowledge changing hands. It is the beginning of judgement.
Then someone raises the unintended consequences. The second-order effects. The people the decision quietly hurts. The thing that breaks because the obvious thing worked. And now something happens that no lecture can stage: a student watches his own decision come apart, not from missing information but from how he thinks, what he overrated, what he would not let himself see. That is not a skills gap being filled. It is an attitude held up to a mirror.
So, where on YouTube is the seminar that argues back? Where is the peer who has staked his own standing on the opposite reading? Where is the habit of reflection, of going looking for the other point of view, that gets built only by being made to account for yourself, again and again, in company? Maybe these things can be simulated alone. Maybe they cannot. The question is worth more than my opinion of it.
The AI age sharpens the question. For whom?
This is the part Kamath’s 2025 line could not quite see, and the part a 2022 dialogue could only point at.
Generative AI does not just make knowledge free, the way the internet did. It is starting to make the use of knowledge free, the S in KASH and not only the K. An agentic system will build the model, run the analysis, draft the memo. If the scarce thing was ever knowing how to do the analysis, that scarcity is draining away while we watch.
So Kamath’s own question swings back on him. If AI supplies the Knowledge, and more and more of the Skill, what is left that is scarce? Two letters a screen has never managed to teach. The Attitude to ask whether the analysis can be trusted, whether the goal is worth chasing, whether the value being created is created with integrity. And the Habit of reflection that keeps a person learning once the answers stop being lookup-able. The smarter the machine gets, the more the judgement steering it is worth. Kamath may have built, without meaning to, the best argument going for the very thing he set out to dismiss.
I say may. I am not sure, and I would not trust anyone who claimed to be. There is a student for whom Kamath is right, for whom the MBA is an anxious transfer of a family’s savings in return for very little, and who would learn faster in the arena than in any seminar. The honest task is not to beat Kamath in an argument. It is to draw the line. For whom is he right, for whom is he wrong, and what separates those two people?
The unexamined education
Let me end where the dialogue ends, with the last thing Socrates says to Aayan: An unexamined life is not worth living.
Kamath has done management education a favour. He has forced it to examine itself, to stop sheltering behind placement charts and salary promises and to say plainly what it is for. An MBA pursued for the Knowledge is, in 2026, hard to defend, and there he and Socrates agree. An MBA pursued to build the Attitude and the Habits that point knowledge toward value creation with integrity, in a world where the knowledge itself is now the cheapest thing in the room, is another proposition entirely. It is the one the provocation never actually laid a finger on.
So which of the two are you weighing? Answer that before you sign the cheque, or before you tell your child not to.
Appendix: Deciphering Management Education — the Socrates Way
The original dialogue, written for the 2022–24 incoming batch at NMIMS University. Reproduced in full.
After securing admission to a prestigious business school, Aayan wondered “why to pursue management education.” His inner thoughts did not provide any clue and were too confusing.
While thinking about what he would get out of it, he fell asleep. In his dreams, he found himself sitting in a classical Athenian Agora, an ancient temple in Greece where important ideas of democracy, justice, and faith shaped our civilization thousands of years back. To his delight, Aayan found himself facing Socrates.
Aayan: Excuse me, Sir, I am facing a dilemma, and I cannot sleep for the last few days. If I may, I ask a question — What is management education?
Socrates: What do you think management education is? What is your impression of it?
Aayan: I believe management education is vital to getting an excellent job in a good company. Having management education is an essential criterion for getting promotions in a company. During the webinars I attended, the faculty emphasized the importance of management education in the current situation.
Socrates: That is surprising. Did you not ask questions in the webinars?
Aayan: Not really. I was not sure whether I would look stupid in asking this question. I was also asked the same question in my MBA interview. I somehow managed to respond, but internally I was not convinced.
Socrates: Why were you not convinced?
Aayan: I felt that professionals across other disciplines such as law, accounting, or engineering also get excellent jobs in good companies. They also get promotions and good placements. What is so special about management education?
Socrates: But do you think, Aayan, that a student’s goal in pursuing any profession is to get a good job?
Aayan: What is wrong with saying that?
Socrates: Nothing wrong! But do you think the objective of a profession is just to get a good placement or promotion? One cannot equate a profession with the notion of placement or promotion or making good money.
Aayan: Are you saying that management education does not imply good placements?
Socrates: Of course it does. But just because management education helps us get good placements, it does not mean that is management education’s goal. Pursuing medical education also provides opportunities for good placements, but it is not the goal of the medical profession. The same is the case for Accounting, Law, and Engineering.
Aayan: I think you are playing with words. It is confusing.
Socrates: The link between profession and placement is a weak link. Suppose your chances of getting a higher placement after two years of experience are 40%. By pursuing management education that increases to 45%, would we say enrolling in management education has made me a better professional? If it were so, everyone going through management education would become CEO.
Aayan: Yes, but I am talking about management education putting me in a separate league.
Socrates: What do you mean by a separate league? Aren’t lawyers, accountants, and architects in a different league?
Aayan: They are, but management professionals come with a different skill set. Management is the art of getting things done.
Socrates: What is the notion of the “art of getting things done”? Are you suggesting people from other professions are not able to get things done?
Aayan: Maybe the use of “art” is in very general terms. But I feel management professionals acquire special skills to manage things through education and training.
Socrates: I still have a problem with describing general management as a set of unique skills. You are using terms essential in all professions, and they are not unique to management.
Socrates: Suppose you were to go for architecture. What would you have said about your goals and the goals of the program?
Aayan: Not much different. All professions focus on a particular set of skills, and a student spends a long dedicated period learning these skills.
Socrates: Yes, all professions are founded upon specialized educational training. But focusing on skills may not lead you anywhere unless you examine the purpose for which one needs these skills. What is the purpose of an architect learning the skills of architecture?
Aayan: I suppose to create exemplary buildings, structures, and optimal use of spaces, and develop a good business out of it.
Socrates: Can you think of this purpose in a larger context? Who decides this purpose?
Aayan: Maybe the professional body governing the architecture profession.
Socrates: Don’t you think it will limit all imagination if the purpose focuses only on creating good buildings?
Aayan: I agree, but what could be a more important purpose? I am not able to think.
Socrates: What about saying something like this: “Given the infinite variety of spaces that can be as varied as life itself, the purpose of Architecture is to improve human life by creating timeless, accessible, safe, joyous spaces for all activities in life. The endeavours must be as sensible as nature in deriving from a central idea and flowering into a beautiful entity. The overriding essence is found in the intangibles — life, heart, soul, spirit, freedom — ensuring within the structure.” These are the words of a famous architect.
Aayan: Wow. This is a curved ball but makes a lot of sense. I now understand what a larger context is.
Socrates: Think now about the purpose of other professions — accounting, law, medicine.
Aayan: This has helped. We have moved from the simplistic definition of education helping us get a job to understanding a profession’s mission. The challenge now is how to define the mission of management education.
Socrates: If I may say, organizations face various challenges, and the purpose of management training is to provide solutions that improve performance. And these challenges are not universal but always local and unique in time, space, and scale. The solutions cannot be universal. The outcomes depend on context, competencies, and how these interact within the organization’s culture.
Aayan: Does it mean that once you experience these, you can create a rule book?
Socrates: Not really. Have you heard about the VUCA world?
Aayan: Yes — volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
Socrates: Can you now use that to test the statement you made earlier?
Aayan: Yes. You cannot create a rule book, as the challenges will evolve continuously. It will be a process of learning, unlearning, and relearning constantly. But how does one develop this skill?
Socrates: Is the process of learning, unlearning, and relearning a skill? What is skill?
Aayan: During our education, we acquire knowledge; skill is our ability to apply this knowledge.
Socrates: Does learning–unlearning–relearning qualify for that test?
Aayan: Not really. What is it?
Socrates: This process is driven by your attitude, your inner motivation, what you value most, and how much hard work you are willing to put in. Even to put knowledge to use needs a positive attitude. Skills cannot be developed without developing a positive attitude. Management education is all about gaining knowledge of concepts, developing a positive attitude to put the knowledge to use by developing skills, and developing habits to sustain this process of learning, unlearning, and relearning.
Aayan: It is becoming complex. How can I remember this?
Socrates: Some professors call it the KASH framework — Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, and Habits. Do you get it?
Aayan: Yes, now it is easy to remember. But we have still not stated the goal of management education. Suppose I want to define it for myself — what would it be?
Socrates: We have examined various dimensions of management education. After joining the management school, you will be trained to create value. You must focus on nurturing the positive power of value creation with integrity. I am sure you can now put all the bits together and develop a comprehensive goal statement.
Aayan: Yes. I will do it immediately.
Socrates: Always remember my last words: An unexamined life is not worth living.
Adapted and extended from a Chronicle first shared with the faculty and staff of NMIMS University on 30 May 2022. The original Socratic dialogue was inspired by Cyrille Sardais and Danny Miller, “Leadership is not what you think: A Socratic dialogue,” Business Horizons (2011).