Indian business schools have long had a good reputation among global recruiters, especially after India opened up its economy in the early 1990s. On LinkedIn’s 2024 list of the world’s top MBA programmes released this week, the signature course offered by Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad, ranks sixth.
The top position is held by the MBA course of Stanford, followed by the offerings of Insead, Harvard, Wharton and MIT’s Sloan. Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), is ranked 19th on the list. This ranking is based on five parameters: job placement, the ability to advance, network strength, leadership potential and gender diversity.
Of course, MBA holders may want to contest LinkedIn’s chart, as B-school graduates professing loyalty to their alma maters would be inclined to, but the focus of our attention should be on what sets India’s best business education apart, globally.
A glance at tuition structures puts it in sharp relief: value for money. Admission to any of the eight two-year MBA courses at US universities that find place in the top 10 would need a student to set aside a budget of about $160,000 or more.
Insead, with campuses in France, Singapore, the US and UAE, is quite expensive too. In contrast, ISB’s flagship one-year MBA can be done for less than a quarter of that sum. Studying at IIM-A is even more cost-effective.
Strategy 101 classes outline two basic market approaches to be competitive: What’s on offer should be either unique or priced the lowest. If it’s both well-differentiated and low-priced, it would be a winner.
Could India leverage this B-school lesson to turn itself into a hub for higher education that attracts students from around the world? The idea has been around. Also, dismissals of it. Two reasons are served up for why it’s unrealistic.
First, we have hardly enough seats for our own students, with a near stampede every year for admission to the few top institutions we have. And second, capacity expansion in the education sector has already led to a drastic drop in general quality.
Surging demand has created legions of degree-printing shops across the country, with the result that India suffers the ills of information asymmetry in its job market.
Like with second-hand cars that tend to sell cheaper than they should because buyers don’t know how well they’ve been kept, degrees from institutes other than the best known are taken lightly by recruiters who can’t be sure of their value.
The latest Economic Survey notes that half our college graduates are found to be unemployable. This dismal state of affairs is a pressing concern, just as poor learning outcomes are at the school level, but that doesn’t mean there is no case for optimism.
The National Education Policy 2020 opened up the sector for foreign universities to set up campuses in India. The aim is to diversify the field and boost competition. Unfortunately, the response so far has been underwhelming.
This should push us to ponder a crucial aspect of educational excellence: academic freedom. While well-reputed institutions across various disciplines appear to have carved out space for themselves, the liberty available to Indian academia in general has been a matter of much controversy.
The upshot is that another kind of information asymmetry may be taking hold, with would-be investors in university projects unsure of what to expect. But then again, all it takes is a clear policy commitment to freedom of academia to overcome that hitch. ‘Study in India’ could yet develop global appeal.
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