Rajesh Thakur/Outlook Group

THE readers’ response to the first-ever B-School ranking, done by Careers360 for our February 2010 edition, was very heartening. We are very glad that the methodology attracted positive comments. Among the many issues you commented upon, four of them deserve a detailed response.

One-year versus two-year programmes
World over, rankings have always compared these two interchangeably. For example, if one examines the Financial Times MBA Rankings for 2010, 11 schools of the Top 50 offer the one year programme. Even when you look at the top five, while LBS (15 months) and INSEAD offer a one-year programme, Harvard, Stanford and Wharton offer two-year ones.

The decision to choose a one or two year programme would be a function of age, experience, current earnings, opportunity, cost etc. But in terms of the value-add, both the institutions and candidates see no difference between the one year and two year options. It is high time, Indian B-Schools also moved in that direction. If newspaper reports are to be believed, even the IIMs tend to place this as an argument for their absence in FT rankings, which is plain obfuscation of facts.

Experienced professionals versus freshers
Previous work experience does matter, especially when it comes to campus placements. People with substantial work experience invariably manage higher pay packages and, at times, are treated separately as lateral placements. But the way to go for the institutions is to be transparent and offer information on placements separately. ISB, Hyderabad has in fact made a good beginning in this direction, since it offers information on placements sliced by the level of experience (visit website for more details). But it would be slightly far fetched to argue that since ISB has a larger contingent of experienced candidates, it must be treated differently, because B-Schools all over the world have a mix of students, though the ratio varies (See Table).

Top institutions that were not ranked
Nearly half the comments from our readers were about the absence of some important schools like IIM Lucknow, SP Jain, NMIMS, GIM, SIBM, SCMHRD, KJ Somaiya, which if ranked, would have qualified to be in the Top 50 list. But unfortunately most of the these colleges refused to participate in the survey. Some like NMIMS, SIBM and SCMHRD, did allow us to review their campus, however, for reasons best known only to them, did not provide us the data.

And for most of these colleges we also could not gather sufficient information from the public domain. However, we believe that non-submission to our ranking scrutiny doesn’t alone take them out of the consideration set for students and hence we had listed them out. But the list was incomplete. Here we give the complete list of 87 colleges that we had shortlisted when we began the ranking exercise. This shortlisting was based on the ranking of colleges by the top four magazines (Outlook, Business India, Business World, Business Today) over the last five years.