Mass production of MBAs flawed

Mass production of MBAs flawed
According to the Centre for Forecasting and Research (C Fore), India has witnessed a quantum growth in the number of business schools from barely 50 in 1991 to more than 2,000 as we speak.We produce close to two lakh MBA graduates every year which ought to be good news for the organised sector that is always hungry for talent. But the picture isn’t as rosy as it would seem on the surface. Not even ten of them have an effective incubation centre to foster enterprise. And not more than thirty of them have the systems and processes in place to deliver quality education. Most of the thirty would be the usual suspects i.e. IIMs, XLRI, ISB, XIM, Symbiosis and S. P. Jain to name a few.
Wake up call for HRD ministry
Ever since I chanced upon this rather troubling data some time back, I have been conducting my own primary source research on B schools in and around Bengaluru. The take away from this exercise has been even more disconcerting. And it is about time the HRD ministry sat up and took notice of the charade that is passing off for professional education in India. No less than the deans of about a dozen B schools that I spoke to candidly admitted to me that about a half of their male students enrolled for the MBA programme only to fetch value in the bustling marriage market. Most of them hardly ever attended classes and did not even opt for internship or final placements. Many female students, likewise, flocked to these faceless institutes to be able to negotiate a lower dowry for themselves. Anybody with a large parcel of land in the city can actually set up a B school as long as he can work the system in the HRD ministry. When the markets are heated, these undistinguished B schools manage to place some of their students but when the economy recesses, they struggle to find jobs for even 20 per cent of their passing out products.Ambience attraction
Interestingly, the placement coordinators of two B school on the southern outskirts of Bengaluru let me into yet another facet of the profile of students. Almost 90 per cent of their students are from the north and choose to come to Bengaluru only to get a whiff of the relatively liberal and cosmopolitan ambience of the city which is denied to them in their far more traditional places of origin.Pune is also a destination of choice for students from the north as it offers a more mixed gender environment than the conservative environs of North India. When I queried the deans further on the demographic profile of their students from the north, they confessed that most of them were children of mid-level government officers whose disclosed sources of income obviously can’t pay for a two year programme that typically costs between Rs 10-12 lakhs including accommodation, meals and transport.The comparatively low incidence of students from the south opting for non premier business schools, according to some of the college officials, was driven by their eagerness to pursue engineering that would lead to a more structured career.A placement coordinator had another interesting postulation. Engineers from South India preferred to either covet the top B schools failing which they tended to settle for distance administered MBA programmes or even executive MBA programmes run by the more credible B schools. Kapil Sibal has made the odd encouraging noise about cleaning up our education system. He could start with our dubious B schools.
POSTED BY:-
SHILPI KUMARI
PGDM-3rd SEM