Management Education in India: 2013
The Issues and the Causes
·
In the eighties and nineties,
most of the B-Schools that came up offered only PGDMs (Post Graduate Diploma in
Management).
·
Since the design and conduct
of the curriculum were in the hands of the B-Schools themselves (unlike
affiliated MBA programs), survival and success demanded that the curriculum is
industry relevant and agile.
·
Some of the well known brands
of PGDM programs such as those of IMI, MDI, XIME, TAPMI, XIMB, GIM, etc. came
up during this period.
·
Only handful of University
MBAs could become brands during this period. Jamnalal Bajaj Institute at Mumbai
and FMS of Delhi University could be examples of these.
·
The period also generated
fly-by-night institutions offering PGDMs that exploited the asymmetry of
information between the students and the institutions.
·
When the regulators want to
control such fly-by-night operators, they adopt a policy of uniformity thereby
controlling well-run institutions too. While the regulators might succeed in
stopping fly-by-night operators, they also try to bring down the performance of
well-run institutions.
·
One of the responses of the
regulators was to stop new institutions from offering PGDMs and instead ask those
institutions to offer only MBA programs affiliated to nearby Universities.
·
University affiliated MBA
programs were designed mostly by academics from the discipline of Commerce and
these programs became a replica of MComs in terms of curriculum, pedagogy and
nature of examinations. The MBA programs became pure academic programs without
much relevance to industry.
·
I am quoting below one of the
questions from the 2012 examination in Marketing of one of the Universities of
Kerala.
o
“Explain the significance of
marketing in business and different types of markets.”
There
are 5 questions of this genre in the question paper. You require only the
distance education guide-book of the same University and two weeks of study
holidays to perform well in these examinations. You do not require a semester
of management training for this.
This is
in contrast to a 10-page case as the question paper that we had to respond to
as students of the same subject 33 years back in IIM. (Universities are lagging
behind by at least 33 years.)
·
University MBA programs have
only two offerings to make.
o
Social Capital associated
with a postgraduate degree (also the possibility of joining a PhD program to
further enhance Social Capital) and
o
Lot of spare time to organize
management festivals that develop event management capabilities in the
students.
·
Outside the University MBA
curriculum, the B-Schools offer Pre-Placement Training which most of the time
is outsourced to private agencies that offer these across many colleges. (So,
what is left for the B-Schools to do?)
·
Since a reasonably good
college offering BCom can easily make the above offerings, there is no reason
why all the colleges in the State should not offer the MBA program too. All
colleges can become free riders in selling Social Capital.
·
Tier 1 PGDM programs continue
to be successes. They have been tested and validated by the market and offer the
students strategic or analytical jobs. Tier 2 PGDM programs have become failures,
as their segment would prefer having Social Capital too apart from Sales and
KPO jobs.
·
While all the above arguments
are on the supply side of MBA, the demand side has pushed the jobs to two
extremes. Most of the industries have become oligopolies and hence there are
very few strategic and analytical positions required to manage them. Technology
has made middle level jobs too thin (One goes online and compares all insurance
policies and then calls a Sales Officer to close the deal). What you have left
with are Sales and KPO jobs that are too thin in content and Entrepreneurship
Opportunities to start firms that may not get scaled up.
o
In other words, you have very
little room at the top and you have large number of uninteresting jobs at the
bottom.
o
The Tier 1 B-Schools cater to
the former and the Tier 2 B-Schools cater to the latter. The Mom and Pop MSMEs
and the Social Sector (which offer interesting jobs) are not presently in the
consideration set of Tier 2 students.
Resurrecting Relevance in Management Education
·
To resurrect, we have to
subject management education again to market forces and thereby eliminate all
the free riders that are in the market only for Social Capital enhancement of
students.
·
To cater to the needs of the
industry, we require only PGDM and not MBA. MBA cannot be easily subjected to
market forces while PGDM can be.
·
While Tier 1 and Tier 2
B-Schools will continue to cater to different markets, their programs will
become more relevant to their chosen segments.
·
We can accelerate the market
forces by
o
Bringing in regulation to see
that industry associations certify the institutions that offer PGDM rather than
organizations dominated by academics.
o
Make the institutions offer
Credits in PGDM that are transferrable across Institutions. (Hence as a student
I can try out one institution for some Credits and if I am not happy, I can
switch over to another Institution for the remaining Credits.) This will
eliminate fly-by-night operators faster.
·
With the present ratio of 1
teacher for every 15 students, we may have to train 1 in every 300 students to
become a teacher (assuming a work life of 20 years for every teacher).
University MBA and PhD may not again be the ideal programs to create good
teachers. We might require stand-alone institutions that will have the
objective of creating management teachers and researchers again subject to
control and certification by industry or industry associations.
In nutshell, what we need is a Program that is
subject to forces of the market and controlled by the industry. By the very
structure of it, it can’t be the University affiliated MBA.
A.
Sreekumar.
Fellow of IIM Ahmedabad
Dean,
DCSMAT Institutions (DC School of Management and Technology Institutions),
Kerala,
India 695 585
91-98465
99995
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