EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
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to put students in situations where knowing is no longer enough and where they have to decide. More specifically, where they must act on incomplete information, see what happens and adjust when reality disagrees with the plan. That is what experiential learning means here: not learning that happens to involve a project, but learning in which the consequence of a decision becomes part of the lesson. That principle runs through every programme taught by Masters’ Union. Students build businesses rather than merely writing business plans, test campaigns rather than simply analysing them, make investment decisions rather than just studying markets and work with practitioners rather than encountering industry only as case studies of things that have already happened. Most business schools already have a case competition, startup elective or live project somewhere in the curriculum. The difference lies in what happens when those experiences are no longer the exception but instead form the default setting around which teaching, student work and assessment are built. That is what makes the following three decisions taken at Masters’ Union part of the same system rather than three separate initiatives, encompassing the questions of who teaches, what students are asked to do and how their performance is judged. The case for practitioner faculty The first decision was about who stands in front of the classroom. Academic expertise provides the foundation: students still need frameworks, concepts and the intellectual discipline to make sense of a problem. But judgement under uncertainty is a different kind of knowledge. Someone who has had to defend a decision to a sceptical client, explain to a board why a campaign failed, or change course when the numbers turned against them brings something a case study cannot. That’s why practitioners do not just appear for the occasional guest lecture at Masters’ Union. Instead, they teach full courses, alongside resident faculty and visiting academics. The model deliberately puts students in touch with people who have had to live with the consequences of the decisions they are teaching them to make. In practice, that means a three‑way faculty model: industry
ith 45 million students enrolled across more than 64,000 registered higher education institutions, India has built one of the world’s largest and most densely credentialled education markets. Yet capacity expansion has not eliminated the underlying problem: choice has multiplied faster than differentiation – and in a market crowded with
conventional degrees, there is a clear demand for institutions that offer a different proposition. The opportunity, in other words, is not to add another credential to an already crowded market, but to make the credential itself mean something different. The instinct of treating a single score as the outcome runs deeper than any entrance exam. It is a mentality that pervades the country’s private coaching industry, as well as towns that are built to prepare teenagers for one test. At its root is an assumption, passed down for generations, that a percentile fairly sums up a young person’s capability and that academic excellence is the clearest sign of promise a family can point to. While that assumption has served Indian engineers and managers well for a long time, it is no longer fit for purpose. Employers have been saying, with increasing consistency, that they are hiring for something a percentile does not capture. GMAC’s 2025 Corporate Recruiters Survey found employers pairing enthusiasm for candidates’ AI fluency with an explicit demand for the human judgement that AI cannot supply: complex reasoning, adaptability and the ability to work through ambiguity without a rulebook. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report has tracked a similar shift for several cycles, consistently ranking analytical thinking, resilience and leadership above narrower technical proficiency among the capabilities employers expect to matter most. This isn’t really about AI. It’s about the growing distance between what a scorecard certifies and what an employer needs to know before handing a graduate real responsibility. The default setting While a scorecard can show what a student knows, it can’t indicate how they will behave when the answer is uncertain. The obvious response to this problem is
practitioners account for roughly half of classroom
Business Impact • ISSUE 5 • 2026
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