A student’s expectations of a B-school depends on their understanding of what constitutes good education for them. However, individual values and priorities apart, they all want good teachers, comfortable spaces, and value-for-money education, and at the end of it a lovely job. And they are willing to work very hard to get it.
Manu Sharma, student of Great Lakes Institute, says, “Extreme pressure at the school is welcome as it helps us deal with any situation where work load is immense”. But they would want the school to respond equally well. As the cost of management education shoots up, expectation levels too are rising. The astronomical Rs one crore plus salary offers also do their bit to raise the bar. That only a handful of students get such offers is not widely appreciated. The ‘over promise-under deliver’ paradigm under which most schools operate does not help either.
The survey results explain in detail why schools have a long way to go in meeting the student aspirations. Across the board, there is not a single B-school in the country that has performed sufficiently well on all the parameters. Take the top schools; while MDI (the first rank holder in private) is very good at MDPs, it performs poorly at consulting where XIMB excels. On the other hand, the top three public-sector schools do quite a bit of consulting, but not as many MDPs. Across the board, none of them score well on international publications. While the quality of publications are better in case of MDI and IIM-B, IMT-Ghaziabad scores on sheer numbers.
In terms of international exchange programmes, none of the surveyed institutions have acquitted themselves well. The top few players do have a good student exchange programme, but faculty exchange is poor. International faculty is still a novelty in most schools. While Great Lakes manages to score well on this count, it fails miserably when it comes to core faculty to student ratio. What is heartening is the slow progress in the Tier-1 and Tier-2 spaces. Many have a publication record and most do a bit of consulting. The schools who are in the reckoning have realised that big buildings can only take them so far. Sidhartha aptly sums it, “It is good faculty that makes an institute; the rest is all extra”. It is high time institutions realise the same. Choose the right school. It would make all the difference.
We have attempted to present both the public and private sector separately, primarily from the point of view of ease of comparison and are driven by different set of values. But the parameters have been kept the same and scoring based on same algorithm. The scoring is based on a Max: Min Schema. So invariably one institution would get the maximum marks for each parameter and one or more would get a zero. The beauty of such an evaluation is that the if the data has integrity, natural clusters would be formed which can then be identified as a particular Tier. In both public and private school’s ranking there are natural cluster formation providing us a certain level of confidence with respect to our data and processes.
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The research team for Careers360's B-School rankings released in December 2011, was lead by Nitin Jindal, Head Consulting. Rozelle Laha and Aeshwarya Tiwari were active members. Occasional data collection and interview support was provided by Papia Lahiri and Shipra Goel. A team of 15 academics provided advice and direction to the team.
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