Start here · The editorial line
What this blog argues
Every piece on OnlineMBA.blog commits to a position. This page lays the positions out in one place, with the essay that carries each one — so you can absorb us quickly and disagree with us precisely.
Most of what gets written about online MBAs in India falls into two piles. One pile wants your enrolment and reads like it. The other aggregates — forty programmes in a table, none of them examined, ranked by criteria nobody will defend in person. This blog is an attempt at a third pile: short essays, each staking one arguable claim, each willing to be wrong in public.
Essays scatter, though, and a first-time reader deserves the spine. Five convictions recur through everything published here. They are set out below, in the order we think they matter, each with the piece that does the real work. If a claim strikes you as obvious, skip its essay. If one strikes you as wrong, that essay is the one to read — it exists precisely to be pushed against.
Above a floor, a higher fee buys teaching — never standing
The most expensive confusion in this market is the quiet belief that a costlier programme is a more recognised one. Recognition is binary and it attaches to the award, not to the invoice. What extra money can genuinely purchase is better instruction, a livelier cohort, a name with more weight in a particular industry — all real, all worth paying for knowingly. Our complaint is that almost no seller separates the two purchases, and the silence is not accidental.
“Approved” is a word that changes the subject
Recognition marketing rarely lies. It does something slipperier: it answers a question adjacent to yours, in a confident voice, and lets you assume the rest. “UGC approved” is the canonical specimen — accurate about something, silent about the thing you actually asked. Our standing advice is to stop weighing adjectives and start collecting paper. For a distance or online degree there is one document that settles the matter, and it is telling how rarely anyone volunteers it.
The sneer at diplomas flunks Indian history
Whenever a diploma is waved away as the lesser instrument, we produce the awkward precedent. Until 2018, when the IIM Act finally took force, the Indian Institutes of Management were not universities and could not grant degrees; what they handed their graduates was a post-graduate diploma — and it was the most fought-over credential in the country. The instrument never carried the prestige; the institution did. So the useful question is not which award type ranks higher, but which one the door you intend to walk through actually names. Where a rulebook demands a degree, take a degree and skip the equivalence argument entirely. Where none does, judge the teaching.
Unaudited outcome numbers are worth exactly nothing
A salary figure with no cohort size, no time period, no median and no auditor is not information; it is typography. We price every placement statistic in this market at zero until someone shows the working — and that discount applies to everyone’s numbers, very much including any put out by institutes this network is connected to. The field test takes one sentence: ask for the median and the denominator, then watch what happens to the conversation.
Your evenings are the scarce input, not your money
Fees can be earned back. Two years of attention cannot. The genuinely expensive failure in distance education is not paying too much — it is abandoning midway, which converts every rupee and every evening already spent into nothing at all. So we argue for deciding backwards from the calendar and from the specific next step you need the qualification for. And we say the thing almost no seller will: for a fair number of readers, particularly anyone already holding a master’s, the correct enrolment is none.
Positions need a return address. Here is ours, and the three pages where we hold our own connection to the standard we apply to everyone else.
Where these arguments are written from
In one sentence: the network that publishes this blog also runs management programmes of its own with two autonomous Lucknow institutes — the Indian Institute of Commerce and Trade, written IICT below, and the Indian Institute of Pharmaceutical Marketing, written IIPM — and every position above should be read with that in mind.
A connection like that is a bias, and the honest treatment of a bias is documentation, not denial. Three companion pages on this domain set out the facts of it plainly:
The Subharti distance MBA, stated plainly
The award comes from Swami Vivekanand Subharti University in Meerut, which holds NAAC A accreditation: a UGC-entitled degree, ₹65,000 for the whole two years, with IICT serving as the learning centre that teaches and supports while the university alone awards.
Autonomous instituteIICT, in its own terms
A Lucknow institute constituted as a registered society and teaching since 1997; the awards it makes in its own name are diplomas, not university degrees, and the page says so without hedging.
Autonomous instituteIIPM, in its own terms
Established 1998 in Lucknow with a pharmaceutical and healthcare management focus; its flagship “MBA” is a masters-level diploma the institute awards itself, and government-recognised university degrees run through separate partner-university enrolment.
None of the three is a recommendation. They exist so that when this blog demands plain statement from the rest of the market, you can check whether it manages plain statement about itself.
Where to go next
The archive holds every essay published so far. The guides section is the practical counterpart — admissions, examinations, fees and recognition handled as how-to rather than argument. And the about page explains who writes here and why the site exists at all.