Looking at the reception that he has got for his recently inaugurated Tetr College of Business, a B-school based on experiential learning, the entrepreneur thinks students and parents are ready for something innovative in education
Pratham Mittal, founder, Tetr College of Business. Image: Amit Verma
Of the 40 courses taught at one of the top 10 business schools in the world, only one caught Pratham Mittal’s attention. It involved working with local businesspersons to solve a problem they were facing such as changing a restaurant's menu or working on a website to attract more customers.
“An experiential education changed my life,” says Mittal, 33, who founded and recently launched the Tetr College of Business to promote the philosophy that had an impact on him—learning by play and experience, not just through books.
Mittal is also the man behind the India-based B-school, Masters’ Union, launched in September 2021. Tetr is his second dream come true—that of opening an experiential business school at a global level. Its inaugural batch comprising 110 undergraduate students from 45 countries commenced sessions on September 4. They will learn the art of business by building businesses every year across seven countries—USA, Italy, Singapore, Brazil, UAE, India and Ghana. For instance, in Dubai, students will have to build a global ecommerce dropshipping business tailored to the Middle Eastern market, with a revenue target of $10,000 (Rs8.39 lakh).
Also, as part of its four-year bachelor’s programme, which costs $232,800 (Rs1.95 crore; full scholarships also available for deserving candidates), these students will study at renowned educational institutions such as IIT (India), SDA Bocconi (Italy), NUS (Singapore), and from educationists and business leaders from Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Cornell, NASA and Estee Lauder, among others.
For Mittal, the business of education may not be new. His parents founded the Jalandhar-based Lovely Professional University of which they are also the chancellors. However, in his words, the “experiments” with pedagogy at these two B-schools are still uncharted territory with results we’re yet to see. In an interview with Forbes India, he speaks about what he thinks of his startups, why education and teaching methods must evolve, and what it has taken to set up a B-school like Tetr. Edited excerpts: