Management

If all 101 institutes are allowed to close, roughly 10,000 seats could be extinguished. Apart from these, certain institutions have applied for closure of their management courses, which could affect another 11,000 seats.

There are over 3,000 management institutes recognised by AICTE offering MBA and postgraduate diploma courses across the country.

In 2017, job offers for fresh management graduates in India hit a five-year low, according to AICTE. In 2016-17, just 47% of nearly 150,000 MBA graduates managed to get campus placements -- a dip of 4 percentage points over the previous year. The drop in placements for postgraduate diploma holders was 12 percentage points.

R Subrahmanyam, the secretary (higher education) in the Human Resource Development (HRD) ministry said the government did not see the closure of management institutes as a problem. “We want to emphasize on good quality education and not just focus on numbers. It is good if substandard institutions are voluntarily shutting down. At the same time, we have taken several steps to improve quality such as mentorship for accreditation, curriculum reform, teacher training, induction programme for students and industry association among others,” he said.

Management studies in India were largely restricted to the Indian Institutes of Managements (IIMs) and some top private institutes a decade back. The demand for management graduates soared as the economy grew, leading to a spurt in new private and government-backed institutes. But in the absence of competent faculty and industry training facilities, experts say most B-schools began churning out graduates who were far from being job-ready.

“There is a serious problem with placements across various streams, and management too is affected,” said SS Mantha, former AICTE chairman.

“The employment scene across the disciplines has undergone a subtle change. For instance, entry level jobs are being boxed out due to AI and automation. At the same time, jobs that require higher-order skills are created but are small in number. Hence the supply demand equation is skewed. So naturally institutes that are unable to sustain will close down,” he added.