View Point: GS Singh
Vision for Best-in-Class B-schools
T here are a whopping 3,700 B-schools in India. However, the vast majority are of suspect quality. None the less, given such concentration and numbers of B-schools, the competition for students and faculty is really fierce and qualified faculty is drastically short. It is a sad state of affairs that majority of these B-schools are just there to fill seats and barely manage to hold classes and run courses and mostly act like placement agencies.
What Makes a B-school Ideal
Any product or service has to be measured from the point of view of an end user. What should a B-school graduate be able to deliver and achieve in the organisation she/he joins? At the lowest level the market demands that a B-school graduate should be able to perform the day- to-day function of the industry/corporate she joins. The knowledge that she/he learns at the B-school will make them perform as good field forces with the potential to become senior managers in the organisation as they go along.
Types of B-Schools
B-schools in India roughly fall under three main categories. Tier I, II and III. Tier I B-schools appear regularly among the top 50 or so in most of the prestigious Indian rankings. These include the older IIMs and many of the established private schools like NITIE, SP Jain, NMIMS, Jamna Lal Bajaj, FMS Delhi, IMT, IIFT, XIMJ, XIMB, TAPMI and others.
Tier II schools, if we may increase the bandwidth by including two+ and two-, are at least a few hundred all across India. It is an interesting group of schools in the sense that it may have schools in existence for more than 20 to a few years. Majority of these schools are run by private trusts. Tier II may also include schools run as university departments in public and private universities.
Many of these, with proper governance and vision, are consistently providing good value-add to the students. These schools have the potential to upgrade to Tier I over the next few years, possess reasonably good infrastructure, are generally approved by AICTE and are mostly run by private trusts. A few are also run as departments of universities and IITs.
The Tier II schools can really propel the quality of management education in India and help in producing excellent young managers in comparatively large numbers.
Tier III B-schools play on the aspirations of the students who have been poor in studies, poor in exposure and feel that they have missed the bus already. Most of these students hail from the Tier III and below towns and villages. The role for these students, coming out of Tier III and lower category of B-schools, could be a field role like a senior sales person, an accounts executive or an assistant HR executive for many years to begin with. These schools should gear themselves to prepare the students for these down to earth but in-demand roles. Thousands of SMEs all over India can be the target recruiters for these students. Exception to the above over a period of time can be brought in by the schools where the learning is of better quality, where team building and group learning is encouraged, pedagogy is dynamic and there is continual effort to enrich the teaching resources.
Challenges and Opportunities
The challenge is to convert each one of the Tier II and III schools into a better category school in India and hence bring in more competitive excellence. The biggest problem is that many of these schools remain in silos and the management attitude is one of complacency and false show as of running the best school but not working towards making it one. Quality of teaching and learning
has stopped evolving because of this attitudinal inertia. Yet, many of these schools are coming up with newer fashionable MBA streams without giving a thought to academic expertise available.
There are a whopping 3,700 B-schools in India. However, the vast majority are of suspect quality. None the less, given such concentration and numbers of B-schools, the competition for students and faculty is really fierce and qualified faculty is drastically short. It is a sad state of affairs that majority of these B-schools are just there to fill seats and barely manage to hold classes and run courses and mostly act like placement agencies.
What Makes a B-school Ideal
Any product or service has to be measured from the point of view of an end user. What should a B-school graduate be able to deliver and achieve in the organisation she/he joins? At the lowest level the market demands that a B-school graduate should be able to perform the day- to-day function of the industry/corporate she joins. The knowledge that she/he learns at the B-school will make them perform as good field forces with the potential to become senior managers in the organisation as they go along.
Types of B-Schools
B-schools in India roughly fall under three main categories. Tier I, II and III. Tier I B-schools appear regularly among the top 50 or so in most of the prestigious Indian rankings. These include the older IIMs and many of the established private schools like NITIE, SP Jain, NMIMS, Jamna Lal Bajaj, FMS Delhi, IMT, IIFT, XIMJ, XIMB, TAPMI and others.
Tier II schools, if we may increase the bandwidth by including two+ and two-, are at least a few hundred all across India. It is an interesting group of schools in the sense that it may have schools in existence for more than 20 to a few years. Majority of these schools are run by private trusts. Tier II may also include schools run as university departments in public and private universities.
Many of these, with proper governance and vision, are consistently providing good value-add to the students. These schools have the potential to upgrade to Tier I over the next few years, possess reasonably good infrastructure, are generally approved by AICTE and are mostly run by private trusts. A few are also run as departments of universities and IITs.
The Tier II schools can really propel the quality of management education in India and help in producing excellent young managers in comparatively large numbers.
Tier III B-schools play on the aspirations of the students who have been poor in studies, poor in exposure and feel that they have missed the bus already. Most of these students hail from the Tier III and below towns and villages. The role for these students, coming out of Tier III and lower category of B-schools, could be a field role like a senior sales person, an accounts executive or an assistant HR executive for many years to begin with. These schools should gear themselves to prepare the students for these down to earth but in-demand roles. Thousands of SMEs all over India can be the target recruiters for these students. Exception to the above over a period of time can be brought in by the schools where the learning is of better quality, where team building and group learning is encouraged, pedagogy is dynamic and there is continual effort to enrich the teaching resources.
Challenges and Opportunities
The challenge is to convert each one of the Tier II and III schools into a better category school in India and hence bring in more competitive excellence. The biggest problem is that many of these schools remain in silos and the management attitude is one of complacency and false show as of running the best school but not working towards making it one. Quality of teaching and learning has stopped evolving because of this attitudinal inertia. Yet, many of these schools are coming up with newer fashionable MBA streams without giving a thought to academic expertise available.
Framework for Excellence
How do we go about bringing in quality improvement and culture of learning in such a milieu?
Vision & Mission: Quality of purpose needs to be the overarching part of the framework for any B-school. A vision and mission evolved with respect to this and its review and validation by all stakeholders should be the accepted process. The continual improvement in the overall quality of governance is one of the outcomes of the framework driven by this vision and mission.
Faculty: Faculty shortage has financial and societal history and absence of good quality research in our university system has compounded it beyond any short-term solution. We are taking our own time to attract the faculty of Indian origin from the US and other universities. In this regard, Institute for Financial Management and Research’s efforts are worth emulating. It has in-house quality research jointly with world-class institutions abroad and gets faculty by offering research opportunities and incentives. Another laudable effort, at a substantial cost, is being undertaken by ISB Hyderabad. Full-time research scholars are engaged at double the stipend than many institutes in India. A pre-doctoral immersion assignment abroad after two to three years into research funded by the institute is designed to show very good results over long term with output as faculty, capable of producing quality research.
Exposure to the best practices through interaction and networking must be encouraged. B-schools need to lay emphasis on faculty and student exchange programmes with other schools within India and abroad. Collaboration in teaching and research and sharing of best practices should be taken as a serious policy goal.
Industry Interaction: A cluster or collaborative approach among the schools with no or very little location advantage can act as a catalyst towards improved industry interaction. ICT can facilitate interaction without really making corporate seniors travel. We have seen initial impact of ICT at IIM Shillong.
Research: Research is one activity which has a very visible impact towards making the environment vibrant and conducive to learning. It’s a part of the key responsibility of an institute to understand the local, national and international problems and issues and address these through research, problem solving and continual interaction and involvement.
Sustainable Management: It’s a buzzword as well as a very timely intervention in business teaching and training approach. Sustainable management, forming the core of curriculum, in every subject taught at B-schools, will go a long way in creating young global managers with sustainability of social, environmental and geographical resources. ASPEN Institute has been doing good work and has developed a matrix for sustainability criteria and learning.
Optimal Utilisation of Resources: Technology and online resources can be used to acquire prerequisite understanding and learning and a mentor or a teacher enhances that learning in the classroom. The faculty crunch can be overcome by using big classrooms and auditoriums. With ICT infrastructure in place, some institutions are already increasing teaching delivery of their star faculties by putting big video screens in multiple classrooms for a lecture. The future could be that a renowned star faculty’s lectures are streamed
over the net in a syndicated manner, thus leveraging the best of teaching across the globe with economy of scale.
Cost Efficiency: A study by McKinsey has shown that cost efficiency of schools can be improved by 25 per cent. Like any other enterprise, efficiency in higher education can be improved by adopting leaner processes in service functions including auxiliary power supplies, air conditioning, hostel services, mess and cafeteria services, logistics and guest house services, etc, that can generate revenues and profits to bring down the cost of a degree to the students and to the institute. For instance, we have lot of scope in India to save on energy consumption. At NIIT University in Rajasthan students’ accomodation is earth cooled, improvising on the design used by ancient Indian builders.
If the Government of India is to reach the higher education gross enrolment ratio target of 30 per cent by 2020, a 25 per cent average reduction in the cost of a degree can help. For this, institutes will need to publish the cost of degree and the best practices in place to achieve it.
Thus, with basics in place and processes and systems implemented to validate and fine tune the vision and mission, we can bring in a lot of value for all the stakeholders.
Framework for Excellence
How do we go about bringing in quality improvement and culture of learning in such a milieu?
Vision & Mission: Quality of purpose needs to be the overarching part of the framework for any B-school. A vision and mission evolved with respect to this and its review and validation by all stakeholders should be the accepted process. The continual improvement in the overall quality of governance is one of the outcomes of the framework driven by this vision and mission.
Faculty: Faculty shortage has financial and societal history and absence of good quality research in our university system has compounded it beyond any short-term solution. We are taking our own time to attract the faculty of Indian origin from the US and other universities. In this regard, Institute for Financial Management and Research’s efforts are worth emulating. It has in-house quality research jointly with world-class institutions abroad and gets faculty by offering research opportunities and incentives. Another laudable effort, at a substantial cost, is being undertaken by ISB Hyderabad. Full-time research scholars are engaged at double the stipend than many institutes in India. A pre-doctoral immersion assignment abroad after two to three years into research funded by the institute is designed to show very good results over long term with output as faculty, capable of producing quality research.
Exposure to the best practices through interaction and networking must be encouraged. B-schools need to lay emphasis on faculty and student exchange programmes with other schools within India and abroad. Collaboration in teaching and research and sharing of best practices should be taken as a serious policy goal.
Industry Interaction: A cluster or collaborative approach among the schools with no or very little location advantage can act as a catalyst towards improved industry interaction. ICT can facilitate interaction without really making corporate seniors travel. We have seen initial impact of ICT at IIM Shillong.
Research: Research is one activity which has a very visible impact towards making the environment vibrant and conducive to learning. It’s a part of the key responsibility of an institute to understand the local, national and international problems and issues and address these through research, problem solving and continual interaction and involvement.
Sustainable Management: It’s a buzzword as well as a very timely intervention in business teaching and training approach. Sustainable management, forming the core of curriculum, in every subject taught at B-schools, will go a long way in creating young global managers with sustainability of social, environmental and geographical resources. ASPEN Institute has been doing good work and has developed a matrix for sustainability criteria and learning.
Optimal Utilisation of Resources: Technology and online resources can be used to acquire prerequisite understanding and learning and a mentor or a teacher enhances that learning in the classroom. The faculty crunch can be overcome by using big classrooms and auditoriums. With ICT infrastructure in place, some institutions are already increasing teaching delivery of their star faculties by putting big video screens in multiple classrooms for a lecture. The future could be that a renowned star faculty’s lectures are streamed over the net in a syndicated manner, thus leveraging the best of teaching across the globe with economy of scale.
Cost Efficiency: A study by McKinsey has shown that cost efficiency of schools can be improved by 25 per cent. Like any other enterprise, efficiency in higher education can be improved by adopting leaner processes in service functions including auxiliary power supplies, air conditioning, hostel services, mess and cafeteria services, logistics and guest house services, etc, that can generate revenues and profits to bring down the cost of a degree to the students and to the institute. For instance, we have lot of scope in India to save on energy consumption. At NIIT University in Rajasthan students’ accomodation is earth cooled, improvising on the design used by ancient Indian builders.
If the Government of India is to reach the higher education gross enrolment ratio target of 30 per cent by 2020, a 25 per cent average reduction in the cost of a degree can help. For this, institutes will need to publish the cost of degree and the best practices in place to achieve it.
Thus, with basics in place and processes and systems implemented to validate and fine tune the vision and mission, we can bring in a lot of value for all the stakeholders.
GS Singh is an Honorary Professor, Guru Nanak Dev University and Chief Advisor EduMint. He has also been an advisor at CRISIL Ltd. In the past he has also been a visiting researcher at INRIA, Paris and a guest faculty at institutes such as SP Jain and MICA. 
