Challenges That Handicap the Indian B-Schools

Over the past few months, there have been discussions on whether B-schools around the world are relevant? It is for this reason that several professors, lead by Srikant Datar, after researching for some time have written a new book aptly titled, Rethinking the MBA: Business Education at a Crossroads.

Going through the book and analyzing the challenges faced by B-schools around the world, several experts have enumerated challenges faced by Indian MBA programmes.

Here are some challenges faced by Indian B-schools -:

1) Mushroom Growth of B-schools in India: MBA program is getting popular day by day among Indian youth day by day. This has resulted a tremendous growth of many small and unrecognized B-schools all over the country. These fake institutes do not offer quality education and make fake promises to lure students. Most of these courses are not even of two- years as offered by IIMs. However, most companies are smartening up and not hiring students from these shoddy institutes. But this has lead a huge no. of unemployed MBA graduates, which are nothing but just another brick in wall.

2) Outdated Curriculum - It Needs to be Updated: For a long period of time, many institutes have not changed their curriculum. It is still outdated and with changing time and needs of the industry, has not been updated. According to a report in Financial Chronicle, the MBA courses focus on three things: knowing, doing and being. Since most professors are from research and academics, the scale is heavily tilted towards knowing. Among premier institutes in India, IIM-Calcutta has done a complete rethink and refresh of its curriculum. Its pedagogy is now being fine-tuned to become accustomed to the new thinking and curriculum.

3) Lack of Quality and Experienced Faculty Members: A major handicap faced by Indian mushroom growing B-schools is, lack of trained and high-quality, experienced faculty members. In India, ironically, a B-school is known by the kind of students it attracts and placements. The need of the hour is to bring boardroom battles in the classroom. We need to concentrate on providing quality education by experienced professors and mentors.

4) Ranking- Its Necessary: It is important to rank the institute correctly as it has an impact on student's career. It is hard to rely on ranking of colleges in newspapers or magazines, as it is biased. One has to take a holistic view and looks at parameters like career advancement, life-cycle earnings, richness of experience and contribution to society for ranking institutes.

5) Preconceived notions, It can be Wrong: Many people have perceptions that since MBAs are highly paid they are only interested in compensation. However, that is not true in all cases. They just get befuddled by the colleges showing high placement packages.