9621 Agnes Crossing, Lake Suzanneview, New Mexico Island 84604-9295.
In Gurugram’s enterprise district, there’s a campus that appears much less like a school and extra like a younger firm embedded inside Company India. The school rooms share
In Gurugram’s enterprise district, there’s a campus that appears much less like a school and extra like a younger firm embedded inside Company India.
The school rooms share partitions with consulting companies and banks. College students spend as a lot time pitching, constructing and managing P&Ls as they do inside lectures.
That is Masters’ Union, based by Pratham Mittal – a third-generation entrepreneur who believes India doesn’t simply want extra universities, it wants a brand new template for the way they’re constructed and run.
Mittal’s story doesn’t begin in a boardroom. It begins in post-Partition Jalandhar, the place his grandfather, Baldev Raj Mittal, arrived as a refugee and commenced by promoting tea and biscuits to a military battalion. In a short time, he realised there was extra margin in making sweets than reselling packaged merchandise – a small however decisive pivot that led to the now-famous Pretty Sweets.
He handled the store like a dwelling case research. Loss-making samosas introduced folks into the shop; the aroma and selection transformed them into clients for higher-margin merchandise.
At a time when most candy retailers left trays open on dusty counters, he selected an enclosed, fan-cooled retailer and a deliberate English title, “Pretty,” to sign aspiration in a conservative market.
The second technology, led by Pratham’s father, Dr. Ashok Mittal, scaled that mindset into Pretty Skilled College (LPU), certainly one of India’s best-known personal universities.
For Pratham, that meant rising up on the intersection of small-shop frugality and large-scale schooling. Counting money on the counter and watching a college develop round him turned, in his phrases, his “first enterprise faculty.”
When Mittal went to the Wharton College on the College of Pennsylvania, he landed in an ecosystem the place constructing corporations between courses was regular. College students weren’t simply studying about startups; they have been creating them. That formed his view of what actual schooling ought to appear like.
Throughout this era, he co-founded Outgrow with Randy Rayess, a SaaS platform that lets companies create interactive calculators, quizzes and different instruments to generate certified leads. The product grew to serve purchasers throughout industries and geographies, and taught Mittal how rapidly merchandise and consumer expectations can evolve.
Again in India, he turned his consideration to politics and accountability with Neta App – a civic-tech platform that allow residents charge and overview elected representatives, typically described as a “report card for leaders.”
The app noticed hundreds of thousands of customers earlier than it was wound down, but it surely left Mittal with one robust perception: well-designed methods can nudge behaviour quicker than coverage debates.
That pondering quickly turned towards larger schooling.
By 2020, Mittal had come to a blunt conclusion: enterprise schooling hadn’t saved tempo with a world the place just about each firm is now a tech firm. The normal mannequin – mounted syllabi, heavy infrastructure, and tenured school – appeared, to him, a century outdated.
Masters’ Union was his reply. Framed as a practitioner-led enterprise faculty, it launched with the Publish Graduate Programme in Expertise and Enterprise Administration (PGP-TBM).
As an alternative of lengthy, static lectures, college students run dwell tasks, construct startups, handle funding portfolios and study straight from founders, CXOs and traders who’re lively of their fields. The curriculum is versatile by design and up to date as markets shift.
On the operations facet, the varsity is intentionally constructed like a startup. Relatively than spending tons of of crores on a standalone campus, Masters’ Union leases house in a DLF company park in Gurugram – turning what’s normally a set capital value right into a variable working expense, and giving college students each day proximity to the very corporations they aspire to hitch or compete with.
College, too, is handled in a different way. The establishment depends on a rotating pool of trade practitioners as an alternative of a totally tenured educational bench. The thought is that “boardroom to classroom” data ought to transfer rapidly, protecting programs aligned with what’s truly taking place in sectors like fintech, D2C, capital markets and AI-driven companies.
Inside Masters’ Union, every main programme – from PGP-TBM and PGP Rise to Bharat immersion tracks and capital markets choices – operates virtually like its personal enterprise unit with a “mini-CEO” in cost. These leaders personal budgets, scholar satisfaction and outcomes, and are inspired to innovate whereas staying accountable for outcomes.
The early days required one thing rarer than a progress hack: belief. With no alumni community and no placement historical past, the founding staff personally known as hundreds of aspirants from entrance-test databases. Sixty college students determined to hitch the primary cohort – the “Tremendous 60” – successfully turning into proof-of-concept for the mannequin. Their outcomes, together with funded startups and powerful placements, turned the primary actual advertising and marketing engine.
The model has continued to develop with surprisingly lean spends. In accordance with the establishment, the annual advertising and marketing price range, together with salaries, is beneath Rs 5 crore – a fraction of what conventional MBA manufacturers put into billboards and mass media.
As an alternative, Masters’ Union focuses on high-signal, shareable experiences: distinct campus design parts, content-driven thought management and student-led storytelling on platforms like LinkedIn.
Greater than 60% of admissions lately have come by way of alumni and word-of-mouth referrals, a ratio even older establishments aspire to.
As Masters’ Union provides packages and experiments with undergraduate choices and new codecs, the problem shifts from “can this work?” to “can this keep sharp at scale?”
The establishment’s reply lies in system-design: asset-light infrastructure, practitioner-led instructing, decentralised management and a powerful emphasis on tradition – hiring “intrapreneurs,” giving them autonomy, and protecting toxicity out of the system. It’s an try to construct a college that behaves way more just like the startups its college students wish to construct.
Whether or not that wager pays off over the following decade will rely upon placement outcomes, alumni impression and the way effectively the mannequin adapts to regulation and competitors.
However one factor is evident: in a sector dominated by legacy manufacturers, Masters’ Union is attempting to compete not on buildings or billboards, however on how in a different way it approaches the basics of upper schooling.
That is only a slice of the story. Within the third version of The Indian Dream journal, we go a lot deeper into:
Learn the entire deep-dive on Masters’ Union in The Indian Dream – Challenge 3 and discover the total sector evaluation on EdTech, Agritech, Cleantech and Shopper Service Tech at: IndianDream.club
