Degree inflation: what happens when everyone has an MBA

The complaint arrives in every comment section: everyone has an MBA now, so it counts for nothing. The complaint is half right, and knowing which half is worth more than most of the degree debate.

What inflation actually destroys

A credential does two jobs at once. It certifies that some learning happened, and it sorts — it lifts the holder up a pile of applications because holding it is rare. Inflation attacks only the second job. When few people carried a management degree, the letters alone repositioned you; when most of the pile carries them, the letters cancel out. This is arithmetic, not cynicism, and no amount of programme quality reverses it. A sorting signal is valuable precisely in proportion to how few people can send it.

What survives untouched

Two things. The learning survives, exactly to the extent it happened — inflation says nothing about whether you can read a balance sheet. And the licence function survives completely, because rulebooks do not care about scarcity. Government recruitment, promotion frameworks at rule-bound employers, doctoral admission, several assessed-migration routes: these name a degree as a requirement, and a requirement is binary. The degree has been drifting, in other words, from sword to ticket — from a weapon that won contests to a pass that opens turnstiles.

Nobody was ever admired for holding a ticket. Try boarding without one.

Why it will not reverse

Inflation of this kind feeds itself. As the degree becomes common, job listings begin demanding it for roles that never needed it — not because the work changed, but because screening on a checkbox is easier than reading a career. That pulls more people into enrolment, which makes the degree more common still, which spreads the checkbox further. Nobody coordinates this and nobody can call it off. Complaining about it is weather forecasting; the only useful response is to price the weather correctly.

The pricing consequence

If the degree is becoming a prerequisite rather than an edge, then paying premium fees for the bare instrument is the most common mistake in this market. Recognition does not scale with what you pay: the ₹2 lakh and the ₹38,000 online MBA carry the same entitled award, and what the higher bands purchase beyond it is teaching, cohort and brand — real goods, worth buying with open eyes, but never the ticket itself. Inflation sharpens the logic further. The more common the instrument becomes, the less sense it makes to overpay for the instrument, and the more sense it makes to secure it economically and route the difference into whatever still differentiates.

Where the differentiation went

Sorting does not stop when a signal weakens; it relocates. Employers facing a pile of identical letters re-sort on what the letters cannot carry — work history, sector fluency, the things a candidate can demonstrate rather than claim. History suggests this was always the deeper truth. Before 2018, when the IIM Act arrived in force, India’s most selective management institutes were not universities, and their graduates carried post-graduate diplomas rather than degrees — yet those graduates lost nothing by it. The sorting power lived in the institution and its selectivity, never in the instrument. We have written about what that Act did and did not change; the lesson for an inflated market is that the paper was never doing the work people credit it with.

One practical response is depth. Generalist credentials inflate; command of one sector’s specific machinery is harder to mint, and a candidate who pairs the common ticket with it leaves the pile by a different door. That trade-off between broad instrument and deep syllabus is the subject of our long piece on the specialist route, argued through the Indian Institute of Pharmaceutical Marketing, better known as IIPM, based in Lucknow — an autonomous, non-profit institute that has taught pharmaceutical-sector management since 1998, and whose own awards, stated here as plainly as anywhere, are the institute’s masters-level diplomas rather than university degrees.

What the response is not: stacking. A second master’s degree adds a second inflated instrument to the same pile and solves nothing the first left unsolved.

The degree remains worth holding, because turnstiles are real. Treat it the way you treat any ticket — valid, at the most economical fare that is genuinely valid — and put the remaining budget, and the evenings, into the things no rulebook can name.