The Hindu Business Line : MBAs, MBAs everywhere!

Almost everyone I meet these days professes to be an MBA. Most of those I have talked to have taken their MBA degrees by availing themselves of the distance education facility that is now commonplace in both conventional and open universities. Many of the universities they mention cannot exactly be described as top of the heap even in respect of the quality of the ordinary degree courses run by them, let alone one on full-fledged, professional business management. Going by casual contacts and interactions, I must admit to a sense of disappointment: Other than the mere fact of holding an MBA degree, their level of knowledge, soft skills and awareness of the range of management practices leaves a lot to be desired

Adding to the disappointment is the disquiet over the phenomenal growth in the number of departments of management and the so-called business schools. Virtually, every university and engineering college has fathered a department of management, apart from stand-alone institutes and schools. At the last count, all put together, they numbered more than 1,000 all over the country, all started no doubt to cater to the burgeoning demand, given the prevailing craze for a degree that, in popular view, has glamour and prestige attached to it, and holds the prospect of attractive pay packages to boot.

Litmus test of performance

It is nothing surprising if, with so many outfits in the fray, effective and sustained oversight and maintenance of standards with reference to minimum essential parameters become casualties. Even the IIMs, the superstars in the field of business administration, are said to be struggling to live up to their reputation.

In this background, I have often wondered whether any effort has been made at any time to subject the numerous departments and institutes to an independent periodical appraisal of their MBA programmes, the calibre and competence of the faculty, the development of linkages and leverages achieved by association with business and industry, the opinion of the campus recruiters and the experience of the employers. My intensive search in the Web did not yield any positive result.

In my view, the litmus test of performance of an educational institution is the high quality of the alumni and how they are faring and what they have made of their lives. It is true that that there are alumni associations attached to every school or college, but they usually do not go beyond ceremonial occasions such as annual days, and do not undertake any special or purposeful surveys to keep track of the old alumni.

Stemming the rot

The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) is supposed to give approval for starting B-schools, but all it does is a cursory physical inspection of the class rooms and the library. Indeed, according to the report of the National Knowledge Commission, “There are several instances where an engineering college or a business school is approved promptly in a small house of a metropolitan suburb without the requisite teachers, infrastructure or facilities…”!

In the absence of a comprehensively designed evaluation of the B-schools, say, once in five years, by an independent, inter-disciplinary group composed of eminent achievers in various walks of life and a compilation of the complete profiles of the alumni and their career trajectories, there is a danger of derailment of management education. A kind of Gresham’s Law will come into operation, worthless graduates driving out the meritorious. Some years ago, a survey found that out of all the management departments and B-schools, only 50 (or barely five per cent) made it to the serious campus recruiters’ list..

The sooner steps are taken to stem the rot, the better.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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