Dear Business Schools: Stop Teaching Like The World Is On Airplane Mode

In India in 2026, many BBA students finish college at around 22 years of age, and many MBA students in early career two-year programs are around 24 years old when they graduate or move through the most critical stage of the degree. They are entering professional life at a time when the world is being shaped by war, layoffs, sanctions, cyber-risk, and fragile supply chains. This means that business schools can no longer teach as if instability is an occasional interruption rather than the environment itself.

The old promise of management education was simple: study hard, get placed well, and climb steadily. However, the landscape facing today’s students is very different. A conflict involving the United States, Israel, and Iran has already shown how quickly geopolitics can shake energy markets, logistics, risk perception, and global business confidence, while ongoing layoffs across major multinational firms have exposed how fragile even prestigious career paths can be.

This is why the real task of business education has changed over the years. The goal is no longer to produce placement-ready graduates. The goal is to produce shock-ready graduates: young professionals who can think clearly in chaos, make decisions under pressure, recover from setbacks, and lead when the world stops behaving like the textbook says it would.

THE WORLD DID NOT WAIT FOR THE CURRICULUM COMMITTEE

The geopolitical backdrop is no longer theoretical in nature. The Council on Foreign Relations reports that after direct Israel-Iran exchanges in 2024, Israel launched a unilateral military strike against Iran in June 2025, and the United States attacked three Iranian nuclear sites on June 21, 2025, before Iran retaliated against U.S. forces in Qatar, and President Donald Trump announced a ceasefire. CFR’s 2026 conflict tracker of the CFR makes it clear that this confrontation remains part of a wider regional war with consequences for energy, transport, humanitarian stability, and business risk.

For Indian business schools, this connection is not abstract. Conflicts in the Middle East can affect oil prices, freight costs, insurance, investor sentiment, and supply chain risk, which eventually shape inflation, hiring, and capital allocation in India. When this happens, the impact reaches far beyond foreign policy seminars. It reaches the internship market, placement season, and students’ assumptions about what a “safe” career looks like.

The labor market has been equally unforgiving to women. Poets&Quants reported in April 2025 that more than 152,000 tech workers lost their jobs in 2024, according to Layoffs.fyi, while TrueUp estimated the 2024 total at more than 260,000 roles globally, including large cuts at Intel, Amazon, and Dell. The same Poets&Quants report noted that more than 23,000 workers had already been laid off across 93 tech companies in early 2025.

This weakness has reached even the most elite MBA ecosystems in the country. Poets&Quants reported that 23% of job-seeking Harvard Business School graduates in the MBA Class of 2024 were still unemployed three months after graduation, while several major schools reported softer technology placement outcomes than in 2022. Therefore, the lesson for Indian students is not subtle: prestige still matters, but prestige alone is no longer protection.

WHY AGE 22 & 24 MATTER MORE THAN PEOPLE THINK

At 22, many BBA students in India are preparing for their first serious encounter with the labor market. They are smart, ambitious, digitally fluent, and often highly optimistic, but most have not yet experienced a real organizational shock. They may know what strategy is in theory, yet have limited experience of what uncertainty feels like when it enters payrolls, operations or career decisions.

At 24, many MBA students are in a different psychological and professional state. They often have stronger expectations of upward mobility, better pay, faster recognition, and a more global career identity. Some had already had internships or work exposure. This means that they are not just entering the market; they are trying to accelerate through it. When layoffs, AI-led restructuring, and geopolitical tensions collide, disappointment can be sharper, and the stakes feel higher.

Therefore, age is important. The 22-year-old BBA student needs preparation for first-entry vulnerability. The 24-year-old MBA student required preparation for early management instability. Business schools must stop confusing academic completion with real readiness.

WHAT 22-YEAR-OLD BBA STUDENTS ACTUALLY NEED

First, they need risk literacy. A modern BBA graduate should understand how war, sanctions, shipping disruptions, elections, cyber incidents, and disasters affect pricing, costs, demand, and recruitment. Geopolitics can no longer be treated as a decorative add-on to international business.

Second, they require career realism. Statista reports that tech layoffs reached 167.6 thousand in the first quarter of 2023, remained above 57 thousand in the first quarter of 2024, and stayed above 43 thousand in the second quarter of 2024. Students entering the market must understand that employability now depends on adaptability, skill depth, and judgment, not just a degree title or a campus brand.

Third, they need resilience before a crisis, not after it. UNICEF-linked research shows that disasters can interrupt education, affect attendance, and harm young people’s transition into employment. Business schools should not be surprised when students struggle under pressure if they have not been trained to absorb and respond to it.

WHAT 24-YEAR-OLD MBA STUDENTS ACTUALLY NEED

MBA students need everything that BBA students need, but at a more advanced level and under higher stakes. They must strategically read uncertainty rather than emotionally. They must learn how to lead teams through ambiguity, communicate during a downturn, and redesign plans when the assumptions behind a business model suddenly collapse.

Poets&Quants found that technology hiring for MBAs remained unsteady in 2025, with schools such as Berkeley Haas, Duke Fuqua, London Business School, INSEAD, and IESE reporting significant declines in technology placement from 2022 to 2024. For Indian MBA students, this means that the traditional story—get the degree, enter a top sector, rise fast—requires an update.

The better story is this: build judgment, build flexibility, and build a career architecture that can survive shocks.

WHAT BUSINESS SCHOOLS IN INDIA MUST DO NOW

1. Put geopolitics and macro risk in the core

Business schools should stop treating geopolitics as a topic for a single guest lecture in international business. Executive programs and specialist courses already frame geopolitical and macroeconomic risks as serious management capabilities, including sanctions analysis, conflict-driven supply disruption, and stress testing. Indian BBA and MBA programs should bring the same level of seriousness to the core curriculum.

Students should regularly work through questions such as: What happens to costs if energy and freight prices rise due to conflict? How do sanctions affect payments and vendor relationships? What happens to a company’s digital operations if regional tensions increase cyber-risk? If a student can memorize frameworks but cannot read a geopolitical shock, the curriculum has failed to achieve its goal.

2. Build crisis simulations into grades, not posters

Students do not become calm in the face of uncertainty by hearing speeches about resilience. They become calm by practicing decisions in stressful but structured environments. Business Schools should build simulations in which students respond to a layoff wave, sanctions announcement, shipping disruption, cyber event, or a crisis in investor confidence linked to war.

These simulations should be considered. Students should not complete their strategy, HR, or operations training without proving that they can decide under pressure, defend a position with incomplete information, and change course without collapsing into confusion.

3. Redesign career services for portfolio careers

The old placement office assumed a stable world in which students moved from the classroom to the employer and then climbed. This world is thinning out. Poets&Quants noted that while opportunities still exist, demand is shifting toward areas such as AI, analytics, cybersecurity, enterprise software, and high-growth firms outside the old default recruiting map.

Therefore, career services must evolve from job placement support to portfolio-career design. Students should be helped to build multiple parallel options: corporate roles, entrepreneurial pathways, project-based work, and skill-based transitions that allow them to pivot when one sector slows. For BBA students, this creates flexibility. For MBA students it creates strategic insurance.

4. Make resilience and recovery a formal learning outcome

Disasters and shocks affect educational continuity, employment, and long-term opportunities for young people. If this is true, resilience cannot remain an inspirational word printed on banners.

Business Schools should create structured failure reviews, reflective assignments, integrated counselling and career coaching, and classroom conversations on layoffs, relocation, deferred offers, and uncertainty. These changes do not always require massive budget expansion. Some can begin within existing courses and student support systems with better design and faculty intent.

5. Teach AI use without surrendering human judgment

The same market that is cutting jobs is also redirecting demand toward AI, analytics, cybersecurity, and digital transformation. Therefore, students absolutely need AI fluency. However, they also need to know when AI is insufficient, shallow, or dangerously confident.

Therefore, business schools should create two learning modes: the no-AI zone and the AI stress-test lab. In the no-AI zone, students debated, negotiated, and made crisis decisions without automated support. In the AI stress-test lab, they first build an argument and then use AI to challenge assumptions, expose blind spots, and improve the final answer. The point is not to ban AI. The point is to stop students from outsourcing their judgment.

6. Connect the classroom to adaptation and recovery

War and disruption do not only destroy. They also force a redesign. Business schools should use this reality to create experiential learning on resilient supply chains, business continuity, worker transition platforms, digital trust, and entrepreneurship in communities affected by disruption.

When students work on these problems, they learn something that no glossy placement brochure can teach: uncertainty is not just something to fear. This is a leadership test.

THE REAL QUESTION FOR BUSINESS SCHOOLS

For deans, faculty, and students, the central issue is no longer whether disruption will occur. It is already here. The real question is whether business schools will continue preparing students for a world that has disappeared or for the one they are actually entering.

In India in 2026, the 22-year-old BBA student and the 24-year-old MBA student are not future participants in uncertainty. They already live inside it. They are reading about war before class, hearing about layoffs during the internship season, and trying to build confidence in a labor market that no longer rewards linear thinking.

Therefore, business schools must move beyond producing placement-ready graduates. They need to produce shock-ready graduates: young professionals who can stay calm during geopolitical turbulence, learn through career setbacks, use AI without becoming dependent on it, and lead with judgment when the world stops making sense to them. In 2026, this will not be a premium extra. This is the minimum standard that serious management education should demand.

Disclaimer: The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Woxsen University or its partners.

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Dr. Hemachandran K is Director of the AI Research Centre at Woxsen University in Hyderabad, India. Dr. Raul Villamarin Rodriguez is Woxsen’s Vice President. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Woxsen University or its partners.

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