The Hindu Business Line : Reading the fine print meticulously

IN A bid to show inflated salaries being offered to their graduates, some management schools talk of figures that border on the bizarre. For instance, last year, a top-rung management school included airfares in the pay packets for students placed in overseas locations. "We are very clear on what constitutes the salary being offered to our graduates. It is whatever is written on their offer letter. This year, for instance, we have excluded medical, pension and insurance benefits that many institutes add," says Piyush Kumar Sinha, Placement Coordinator, IIM-A. Sinha says that last year, he came across an institute that had even added the airfares to be paid by the companies to their new recruits for calculating the pay packet. "All this is done simply to bloat the compensation figures by including all kinds of charges, real or notional. After all, the higher the figure, the easier it is for the institute to sell itself to prospective students," he explains. .

As Indian MBAs get accepted in the international job market, graduates of top rung B-schools are getting salaries that are the same as their international counterparts. "It is not as if our students command a premium in terms of the salary offered. Globally, companies offer the same salaries to all their recruits at a particular level. The difference is that our students are accepted at comparatively higher levels by the recruiters," says Sinha. For instance, two students of IIM-A have been offered a salary of $185,000 per annum by Barclays for a Singapore posting. Other students taken by the same company for positions a notch lower earn a lesser salary.

While IIM-Bangalore states that its student has been offered $193,000 by the same company for a London posting, the compensation details of the IIM-A student at the same location are yet to come in black and white. "It is a wrong notion that students bargain for salaries during placement. Companies who come to the campus are already aware of what they can offer and that depends on industry trends. The actual offers made on campus may vary in a small band, but cannot be much different than what that company had in mind while coming," he says.

Another anomaly creeps in when institutes include the highest salary offered to a couple of students with a comparatively higher level of experience.

"One of our students, an Indian Police Service officer with nearly 20 years of experience, has been offered Rs 34 lakh per annum. If we include that figure in our average salary, the figure will automatically get skewed," says Sinha.

IIM-A gives out average entry-level salaries and average lateral placement salaries separately. The former this year stands at Rs 9.72 lakh and the average lateral entry salary, including the top figure of Rs 34 lakh, stands at Rs 10.6 lakh this year. For the record, IIM-A also reveals the lowest salary, which very few institutes do. Of course, even that figure is respectable enough.

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