Edu-leaders

Hyderabad will soon have the Indian campus of Canada’s Schulich School of Business (SSB) of York University. The school is expected to start in September 2013 near the Rajiv Gandhi International Airport at Shamshabad. The new campus, in its first year, will have an intake of 60 students. The number will go up to 120 and 180 in the second and third years respectively.

Infrastructure company GMR group wants to make a mark in business education and its partnership with the SSB to set up a campus in Hyderabad is a step in that direction. The group will be pumping in about Rs 100 crore in the project. This includes 25 acres of land for the campus and setting up its physical infrastructure. Schulich will invest about Canadian $5 million for the development of academic infrastructure, faculty and research.

The agreement to build Schulich’s campus in India was inked in Toronto last month. A ceremony to mark the beginning of the campus was held in Hyderabad on Tuesday. Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Kiran Kumar Reddy was present at the occasion.

According to reports, GMR Chairman G Mallikarjuna Rao said India would continue to send a large number of its students to western universities for higher education for the next 10 years.

The new campus would be a mirror-image of SSB’s Canada campus and its aim would be to create globally-oriented managers for the rising number of India’s multi-national companies.

At the occasion, Reddy said that the government would encourage quality higher education institutions to set up their campuses in Hyderabad. He also said that the focus of the government is on improving the quality of education in government schools and to enable easy access to higher education. It is spending Rs 3,500 crore on fee reimbursement and scholarships which cover 2.7 million students in Andhra Pradesh.

The new B-school will start with a two-year MBA course and executive education programmes later. Admissions to its MBA course will begin from January 2013, depending on approvals under the Foreign Educational Institutions Bill which is already before the Parliament.

The process of admission will be common for both India and Canada. Students can choose either of the two campuses. It will be based on cumulative grade point average at the graduate level and GMAT. Candidates with work experience of five to seven years will be given preference. The fee ($30,000 per annum) shall also be the same for both the campuses.