A LONG HAUL
A new bunch of B- schools promises to reinvent management education but is pulled down by red tape and bureaucracy
When the Financial Times came out with its Global MBA Ranking in 2017, it was a mixed bag for Indian B-schools. Not a single Indian institution was among the top 25 although INSEAD (France and Singapore) grabbed the top spot for two years running. Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business ( ISB) emerged the leader from India with an overall 27th rank while Indian Institute of Management ( IIM) Ahmedabad slipped five spots to land at No. 29. IIM Bangalore was up 13 spots to be 49th and IIM Calcutta, a first-time entrant to the elite league, finished a distant 95th.
Closer home, the tidings are not good. According to a 2016 report by ASSOCHAM Education Committee, only 7 per cent of the students graduating from an estimated 5,500 B-schools in India are employable. The study goes on to say that barring a handful of top institutions, most of the B-schools in the country are producing sub-par graduates. Consequently, they earn less than `10,000 a month when they manage to find placements. As management training is expensive and requires medium-to-long-term commitment, low education quality, coupled with shrinking campus recruitment due to the current slowdown, does not augur well for thousands of young aspirants.
GLOBAL OUTLOOK, HOLISTIC LEARNING:
In a fast-moving world, the key challenge lies in preparing future managers for a global environment and sensitising them to local issues that would ensure effective problem-solving. A handful of Indian corporates have already realised the potential of holistic and collaborative learning to achieve this target and tied up with overseas universities to set up new-age management institutions. Their objective: A thorough understanding of global perspective, latest industry trends, experiential learning and a high employability quotient so that their students have more rounded personalities.
The School of Management, under the BML Munjal University in Gurugram, is one such institution. Founded by the Hero Group, it has tied up with Imperial College London as its academic mentor, which handheld them in setting up the institution. It has further collaborated with global universities such as Singapore Management University so that its students get the opportunity to study specific modules at those universities. The differentiator, says Dean Vishal Talwar, is that the school offers experiential and practical learning, which is 40 per cent of the entire MBA curriculum.
Other such institutions include Jindal Global Business School ( JGBS), the School of Management and Entrepreneurship ( SME) at Shiv Nadar University, GMR School of Business and Hyderabad-based Woxsen School of Business. Each of these B-schools is dedicatedly working to find its niche in the management education space and fill in the huge demand for good managers.
Tapan K Panda, Dean at JGBS at Sonepat, Haryana, says it is ideally positioned to evolve into a multidisciplinary management school. “We have six other schools specialising in Law, Liberal Arts, Public Policy, Corporate Affairs and other relevant topics around us, and our students get a chance to attend courses across domains, a quality that is much sought after in today’s business leaders.” As Sonepat is home to several small and medium enterprises ( SMEs), the B-school has further developed an SME network so that their students could understand the challenges that the sector faces and how to deal with those. It will help them go back to their family businesses or start their ventures when college is over, says Panda. In addition, over 100 students visit international campuses every year to gain global perspective. JGBS has tied up with European Business School in Germany, Queen Mary University of London, the University of New Brunswick in Canada and others to facilitate these visits.
Similar tie-ups with top overseas institutions have taken place, thanks to India’s growing MBA market. Italy’s SDA Bocconi School of Management (under the University of Bocconi in Milan), in collaboration with the Mumbai International School of Business ( MISB), started offering a post-graduate programme in Business from July 2012. This is SDA Bocconi’s first foray outside Europe. “In
A key concern of corporate- backed schools is that they are not yet viable and largely depend on corporate funds. When companies fail to perform, funding gets affected
Milan, there is always a cohort of Indian students who have chosen SDA Bocconi for the next steps in their career; so it made sense to offer the school faculty and the content directly in the country, recruiting from excellent potentials who cannot afford the investment of going to Europe,” says Alessandro Giuliani, Managing Director of MISB Bocconi.
Another key offering includes courses developed in collaboration with large corporates. For instance, BML Munjal has tied up with Axis Bank and IBM. “We offer an MBA programme in Business Analytics in association with IBM where the latter is responsible for creating the content and also delivers part of the course. This helps bring in real-world knowledge to the classroom and also increases students’ employability,” says Talwar.
WHAT’S HINDERING THEM:
Efforts are on by new-age B-schools to reform the management education landscape in India. However, it is fraught with challenges. At the beginning, SDA Bocconi’s growth in India has been slower than anticipated. “Indian students are euphoric about American schools; so, we had to break through that perception and work to get recognition. That took some time,” says Giuliani. It started in 2012 with 25 students in the first batch while the current one has 84. Its faculty from Italy visits India to teach the business course.
“In the education space, one cannot blatantly market the institution. The reputation has to be built over time by word of mouth, leveraging industry connect and the alumni’s career growth,” says Giuliani. He claims that the students are placed with an average salary of `10.2 lakh and working in
Indian students are euphoric about American schools; so, we had to break through that perception and work to get recognition as a top European B- school