The history of management education in India is hardly about four decades. However, during this brief life span it has seen several ups and downs. Like many other fields of economic and social activities, there had been substantial government intervention in this area as well at the start of the country's history after independence. Absence of a national higher (including management) educational policy, unnecessary regulation, bureaucratic methods & procedures, deficiency in quality consciousness, lack of clarity and congruence of thought amidst others were prominent features of management education at the early stage after independence. Should this be left to the private enterprises? To what extent should the government interfere in promoting business education? What should be done to ensure there is no dilution of quality?

How can Indian B-schools compete with their counterparts abroad? Should there be unified national policy for higher and technical education including management education? The absence in clarity of thought led to a number of contradictions and emergence of various clusters of schools. However, apart from Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), XLRI, and a few University departments there was hardly any good school upto middle of 1980s. Private participation was virtually absent. It was only in mid-80s that private enterprises entered into this arena in a big way giving rise to a number of B-schools.

And subsequently since 1990s, there has indeed been a crazy rush for opening B-schools; it has, in fact, become more of a commercial proposition compared to social and charitable activity. There are today more than 1,000 b-schools in the country producing around 100,000 MBAs each year. In view of the booming economy and demand for qualified managers, many schools still manage to survive; but it is only a matter of time before there is a real shakeout in the field. Indeed the proliferation management education providers in the country have raised the issues relating to its quality.

Serious Concern Areas

a. Academic Ambience:

The very survival of a business school depends on the quality of academic ambience it creates for students to learn and develop into effective managers. It depends on several factors that include quality of teachers, rigor of admission/selection process, development of right curriculum & appropriate delivery systems, mix of classroom and applied methods of pedagogy, constant interaction with corporate, continuous upgradation in methodologies for improvement in the academic processes, existence of adequate learning supporting systems and tools like library and computer systems, among others. This is what forms intellectual capital at an institute. Unfortunately, many of the Indian business schools lack in most, if not all, parameters mentioned above. There are no adequate faculty members in many business schools; some have very few core faculty and, therefore, largely depend on outside visiting faculty. Some of these visiting teachers are not committed ones but simply freelancers teaching across a large number of institutes without any dedication or focus thus diluting the standard of education. There is serious dearth of Ph.D. faculty members across the industry. Student to faculty ratio is quite adverse (sometimes as high as 20-25:1) compared to international standard/norm of around 8:1. In absence of good quality teachers the process is often facilitated by persons who are not well-equipped and this causes one of the major areas of dissatisfaction among the students of business schools. The other serious problem has been "partial dis-connectivity" with corporate world in the content of teaching.

b. Thought Leadership:

In a recent survey conducted by the undersigned among a large number of HR professionals (who are involved in the process of recruiting), the major finding has been that many of the MBAs produced do not have either "academic depth" or "corporate perspective." Therefore, they lack in all three essential parameters of managerial acumen i.e. knowledge, skills, and attitude. The genesis of management education in the early Twentieth Century lies in specific corporate behaviour/action and subsequent efforts to put an academic framework for the same to draw a generic conclusion. This is possible only if there is perfect collaboration between the teaching fraternity who are academically strong and the corporate who are willing to share the information. This interaction can lead to meaningful and relevant results that can then be brought to the MBA classroom. This is how many of the contemporary management thoughts and ideas in recent times have generated particularly in the US context. Unfortunately management education in India is often bereft of such interaction and thus has not created any significant and breakthrough thought leadership. The contents are often academic, obsolete, lack global perspective and do not have practical focus; the delivery mechanism is also teacher-centric and lacks variety and innovation.

c. Quality Issues:

The success of an educational endeavour, to a great degree, depends on the process approach with quality focus. The process should have well-defined goals and objectives (within a broader vision), evaluation of existing competencies and finding gap between desired and available, resource mapping, and finally a strong implementation framework with pre-determined methodology for constant review and monitoring. This alone can ensure quality of the process with desired results.

d. Regulation:

During initial phase of development for the first 30 years or so there was no central and single point regulatory authority for the management institutes in India. Regulation was largely structure dependent; for example, Government of India for the IIMs, Universities for the departments or affiliated colleges, and so on. However, with a view to bring about homogeneity in the system, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) came into being in the 1980s under an Act of Parliament, to look into the developmental, quality as well as supervisory aspects of management education. How far the experimentation has been successful has always been a debatable issue. Even the most vocal and ardent supporters of AICTE would agree that its approach and functioning need to be strengthened to a large extent. The main issues in this regard have been political intervention in the functioning of AICTE, lack of clear focus on its part and bureaucratic approach of looking at management education that had more bad than good effects.

e. NBA:

It must, however, be added that things, in last few years, have definitely changed for the better with the distance between AICTE and business schools narrowing down substantially, and much more respectability being perceived in the functioning of AICTE. The setting up of the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) as an autonomous body for ensuring quality education in the country has also been a welcome step. However, the regulatory issues need a thorough national level debate. The proposal of setting up of a national level of regulatory body in the recent recommendations of National Knowledge Commission (NKC) is likely to create more bureaucracy in the system thereby generating more problems than solving the existing ones.

f. Governance Issues:

The corporate governance issues are equally applicable to management institutions. In fact such institutes are expected to be role models of corporate governance including ethical standard, openness and transparency. However, the ground reality has been that many of the institutions lack substantially in respect of many of the above areas. These include :

• Interference by various interested groups including political & bureaucratic hassles for getting all types of approvals
• Lack of academic commitment on part of the promoters
• Non-rigorous admission process
• Prevalence of capitation fees despite regulations to the contrary
• Lack of adequate authority at the micro-management levels of the institutes
• Inadequate checks and balances
• Absence of academic & governance committees
• Inadequate student involvement
• Lack of process orientation & quality
• Absence of collegiate spirit.

g. Corporate Integration:

As stated earlier, the process of delivery of educational system of management institutes is expected to be extremely application focused as the managers besides having strategic perspective need to possess administrative and technical skills. This can only be achieved through adequate corporate integration. Unfortunately in India the concept of this integration is primarily restricted to placement for majority of the management institutions. The other forms of integration include continuous exchange of ideas between institutes and corporate, implementation of "sabbatical leave" both for the faculty as well as the corporate personnel for swap on a continuous basis, research & consulting activities by faculty, institution of chairs and funding by corporate of research initiatives by faculty among others. Lack of germination or cross-fertilization of ideas between management institutes and corporate, particularly in the Indian context, has not helped either.

h. Placement-Centric Approach:

At the end of the day the success of any management institution depends how effective the managers created by the institutes have performed on the field. Unfortunately, the sole parameter of judging the efficacy of a management institute has been how effective the placement process has been. The quality of education has often taken a back seat. Many b-schools are simply surviving through leverage of their past equity and converted themselves into mere placement agencies than provider of quality education. The institutes are not alone to be blamed for this. The perception of the most important stakeholders i.e. the students is often myopic and hence placement centric. It is the institutions that need to go beyond the placement phobia and create right academic ambience with quality teaching. This will automatically result in better placement. The route may be long but the right one. The rating agencies also need to play a very crucial role in this regard.

Future Agenda :

Management education in India is indeed at crossroads. Despite quantitative increase, quality is a serious question mark. In view of booming economy and gap between demand and supply for managers, many of the institutions are still in a position to enrol students. However, how far and how long the boom will continue is difficult to predict. Academically there is serious concern about the looming possibility of the burst of the growing balloon of management institutes sooner or later. A shake out and period of mergers & acquisitions is not far ahead. The regulation is weak and equally unorganized. The educational system neither requires government intervention nor artificial regulation in terms of allocation of number of seats or fixation of fees. This creates more nepotism and gives rise to unnecessary intervention and scope for corruption. It also high time that Indian business schools create global "Indian MBA Brand." This is not a difficult task; what is needed is a global mindset and determination to win. What will happen to smaller schools is a difficult question to answer. Some of these schools may have to cater to the specific geographical needs, some unique niche requirement and some may have to go in for strategic alliance with others. A final word of caution: to compete and succeed in this complex world of management education, the prescription for success would be a big challenge and new & innovative strategies need to be worked out. Otherwise survival could become a real issue.

Benchmarking Indian B-Schools

Dr. B. S. Sahay, B-School quality expert and Director Institute of Management Technology Ghaziabad favours using accreditation as the best benchmark for showcasing b-schools quality.

India has a strong tradition of higher education since ancient times. Today, India is the third largest higher education system in the world (after China and the USA) in terms of enrolment. In terms of the number of institutions, however, India is the largest higher education system in the world with 17973 institutions (348 universities and 17625 colleges). Engineering education started in early fifties with the setting of institutions like Indian Institute of Technology and the foundation of Indian business school goes back to early sixties. Post 1991 period of liberalization and globalization in India, caused a significant shift in Indian industry and the private sector attained initiative to gain world level competencies. This created big opportunities for management education and at the same time desired for some significant changes in its characteristics. There are about 1700 or more management institutions approved by AICTE, besides IIMs. 

Spurred by the economic boom, demand for MBAs from corporate India is on an overdrive as never before. Almost every company in every industry is expanding, creating new jobs and in new locations. Financial services, retail, telecom, IT and ITES are some of the industries that are scrambling to recruit young managers. Over the next 10 - 15 years, as we can envisage today, the country will need about 300,000 managers a year as compared to the current generation of 100,000 managers. In spite of the 1700 odd business schools, the forecasts suggest that there is a capacity crisis in our business schools. The trends of the students going abroad for studies also reveal the demand-supply gap in the sector. The US being the world's number one educational destination, attracts about half a million students every year.

While these clearly bring out the need for increasing the supply side of management education in India, the biggest area of concern is attaining the quality standards. According to McKinsey (2005), only 25% of Indian engineers, 15% of its finance and accounting professionals and 10% of Indian professionals with general degrees are suitable to work for multinational companies. In spite of the large pool of middle mangers available at home, some Indian firms are beginning to recruit them from abroad. India requires globally competitive managers, who can effectively run enterprises and deal with challenges facing Indian business and industry. The National HRD network estimated the demand for a certain quality of MBAs for the year 2007 as more than twice as much last year in 2006 i.e. 70,000. Contrarily, as per one of the recent reports, till March 2007, National Assessment & Accreditation Council (NAAC), could accredit only 3, 942 colleges and 140 universities in the country. This implied that nearly 75 % of colleges and 56 % of universities have never been assessed for quality standards. In the business school fraternity, not even a single school happen to be among the top-50 in any international rankings.

Various studies on management education in India, show up emerging trends like more applicants, better placement records, improvements in technology and infrastructure, upward movement in salaries, element of internationalization, all indicative of a growing sector. However, while most of the schools have been found to put up good physical and academic infrastructure, majority lag behind grossly in outcomes, such as skill sets imparted in graduating students, research outputs, collaborative studies, training or consultancy. The weakest areas among majority of the business schools have been poor faculty performance and lack of research orientation. Even the best of business schools do not measure up to a score of 70 per cent or more in ranking scores in factors such as, intellectual capital, research, campus industry interface.

In determining quality and long term sustainability, an institution has to be concerned about its outputs, i.e. producing uniquely educated, highly satisfied and employable graduates. This would require providing them with a variety of avenues to success which are derived from market needs. For example, the industry looks for a flexible attitude and open mindset in students along with the other functional and managerial skill sets. At the same time, the competitive and a highly dynamic environment has created a need for, what they call as problem solvers. Good institutions will have to be abreast of these requirements and translate them into appropriate curricula and developmental experiences. Management education is no longer considered an entirely national enterprise. In the global context, management education is about expanding scale, network or knowledge economies beyond local markets, about devising business models that exploit economic inefficiencies across nationalities. It is about leveraging differences or taking advantage of similarities in markets, human capital, institutional and cultural contexts, and about bridging supply and demand beyond national markets.

Quality Benchmarks

A framework highlighting factors for quality benchmarking in international context is the need of the hour. Benchmarking, a quality improvement strategy is a discovery process which seeks to identify particular practices or organizations which are best-in-class in their performance area and ascertain what they are doing to achieve this exemplary status. This allows institutions to assess their current levels as against the desired level of quality standards.

Web sites of few leading institutions and universities in the world suggest important benchmarks in factors, such as, internationally focused programs of study; overseas curriculum; international institutional linkages; student exchange programs; internationally recognized research activity; international research collaboration; staff interaction in international context; support for international students; attendance to international conferences and few more. Understanding the importance of these factors, and the difference between current and desired levels of performance, shall be a powerful aid for systematic decision-making as far investment in campuses, people and programme is concerned for attaining desired quality levels. The exercise should be credible enough without any biases based on certain sound statistical methodology. This must be exclusively used for continuous improvement identifying external comparisons to calibrate performance. Institutions must focus on their missions, i.e. output and not activities or inputs; identify their strengths and weaknesses and identify statistically where energy and resources should be focused.

Presently, the toughest benchmarking challenge, in this context, is the internationalizing of the curriculum and outlook of the programme. Rapid development of global initiatives in terms of international linkages is essential for maturing of management education from a global perspective. Asian business schools have moved ahead with meeting the needs of business by providing students with a specialized international component.

For instance, the University of Hawaii stands as a model of internationalization in the way it specializes in the Southeast Asia trading block. Indian business schools need to focus on the typical internationalization strategies as put forward by Hawawini; import model of internationalization (bringing world to the school); the export model of internationalization (sending abroad faculty and students); or the network model of internationalization involving the creation of a multiple-site institution with full fledged campuses across the world (a more pure brick and mortar strategy). The Indian Management institutes have had collaborations with the world's leading business schools. Indian School of Business (ISB) with the Kellogg School of Management, the Wharton School, and the London Business School; IIM Ahmedabad with the Harvard Business School (HBS); IIM Calcutta with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); and so on. These partnerships provide their students with the benefit of international exposure and contemporary and global course content in addition to the standard training on Indian management practices. Institutes like IMT have been successful as well, in developing such linkages worldwide.

AACSB, with reference to the requirements for global management in curriculum requires 'exposure' of students to global economic environments. The EFMD, more explicitly requires a minimum degree of internationalization across the different areas of the school - faculty, students and content. Indian business schools need to devise methods by which they can provide opportunities for global experiencing. Students exchange programme with foreign institutions will provide opportunities to understand businesses worldwide. With new technology facilities like video conferencing etc, more opportunities can be arranged for interaction with the business leaders and managers from their own plants or offices.

Few business schools in the West like, Yale school of management have responded to the changes of the times and have the curriculum designed to meet the management challenges of contemporary world. Instead of teaching management topics in separate, single-subject courses like Finance or Marketing, these are taught in an integrated way, providing frameworks and concepts in a richer and more relevant context. By creating an integrated curriculum, it actively draws connections between the traditional MBA subjects. Yale's innovative approach not only make it contemporary but also inspires more creative problem solving.

The heart of this new way of thinking about the traditional MBA is a series of eight multidisciplinary courses from different academic disciplines. Called as organizational perspectives courses, these include focus on the roles, a manager must engage in, motivate and lead. Prior to the organizational perspectives courses, all first year students take part in a six week orientation foundation of the basic tools and language of management that the rest of the first year builds upon. Next students need to participate in a 10 day international experience trip to study various aspects of the global business environment. The Indian business schools should take a lead in experimenting with the Yale experience in the Indian context.

Moreover, the long term competitiveness is likely to depend on the capacity to establish and maintain strategic alliances with overseas institutions. IMT while establishing nearly two dozen international MOUs emphasizes on maintaining these alliances active in all four areas, i.e. student exchange, faculty exchange, research collaborations and conducting international conferences.

These examples can be the beginning points for the benchmarking exercise, however, to make the exercise fruitful, enough care needs to be taken. The initiative should be placed in hands of the people who are in the best position to initiate sustain and support improvement. Ad hoc arrangements can serve as short-term solutions only. Here I would rather suggest involving industry in the teaching-learning process. If the industry participates in teaching, training, research, consultancy, governance and other prime functions of an institute like design and delivery of the academic programs, it will help establish global benchmarking. We, at IMT, believe in involving the industry into the plethora of our academic engagements. The programs we offer are market-oriented and hence our endeavours are market driven. The pedagogic methods we use are industry-enablers, preparing students to fit into the corporate culture. Besides setting up endowments and working on other incentives from industry like research grants, consultancy, training, research chair professors writing case studies, I think we will be closer to the desired level in many of the benchmarking parameters indicated above.

All Roads to Accreditation

A. Thothathri Raman, Educational Quality Expert, Consulting Editor of Business India, Managing Trustee of SEAA Trust and convenor of India Accreditation Seminar argues that international accreditation is the new route to global branding for Indian B-schools.

The acknowledged leader of b-schools IIM Ahmedabad created history of sorts by becoming the first IIM to be globally accredited and also the only school to obtain the prestigious EQUIS (European Quality Systems) among the 1700 strong b-school community in the country. The three year conditional accreditation IIM A obtained marked a new beginning for the Indian b-schools who are fast aligning themselves with the world and are furiously working towards obtaining global benchmarks from any top rated accreditation agencies. “I have been searching for EMBA programs as well previously. I think you might try Helsinki School of Economics, HSE. They have triple accreditations from Association of MBAs, AACSB and EQUIS”, a random comment at the Businesweek online should sum up the significance the stakeholders attach to using accreditation as a reliable benchmark to assess quality of a b-school.Accreditation is seen globally as the best means not just to build a b-school brand but also a way to rework the priorities and streamline the operations of the b-schools. In India, though the IIM A claims in its website that "the EQUIS accreditation has ensured IIM-A's place as the first and the only business school in India to obtain international accreditation", it has been popular in Indian b-schools with at least two b-schools, namely MDI Gurgaon and Alliance Business Academy, Bangalore (ABA) having bagged accreditation titles from Association MBAs popularly known as AMBA and International Assembly for Collegiate Business Education IACBE respectively in 2005 and 2007.

“We have been working with MDI since 2004 and all its postgraduate general management programmes are now accredited by us”, explains Dr Mark Stoddard, accreditation manager of the UK based Association of MBAs. IIM-A joins the list 155 EQUIS accredited schools spread over 33 countries. MDI is in the company of 152 business schools located in 69 countries which are accredited by Association of MBAs. AACSB pioneered the B-school accreditation process way back in 1916, with ACBSP following suit in 1988. IACBE, an offshoot of AACSB, is the latest entrant founded in 1996. EQUIS, the European Quality Improvement System managed by EFMD and AMBA all started around the mid 1967's. “Obtaining three accreditations together is a tough task which only around 30 b-schools in the USA have done”, explains Bijoy K. Sahoo, assistant Vice Chancellor of North Carolina Central University in Durham US. Sahoo was responsible for his school getting three accreditations from AACSB, EQUIS and ACBSP. ACBSP is one of the most aggressive accreditation agencies in the field started two decades ago and it has on its list 403 schools that have achieved accreditation. “We would expect Indian b-schools to start looking at international accreditation soon”, hopes Douglas G Viehland, Executive Director of ACBSP who was on a promotional visit to India.

Accreditation Fall Out

With over 100,000 Indian students migrating abroad for studies spending close to US $ 6 billion, reversing the flow would have massive business opportunities for the India b-school brand. The reversal can be done only based on benchmarking the Indian b-school quality to the best in the world through the globally accepted accreditation process. It is not that accreditation is new to India as two government led accreditation programmes have been running in the country, one by AICTE run National Board for Accreditation (NBA) and another National Accreditation and Assessment Council (NAAC) run by University Grants Commission (UGC) which looks at courses being offered by the b-schools. Though the b-schools did not take to these accreditation assessments initially, through a UGC mandate, the accreditation certification has been become a precondition for the schools to apply for grants or loans. "Accreditation of this kind is no longer voluntary and beats its very purpose. Also the whole process is as bureaucratic as applying to AICTE for its permission to start a new course", comments a top b-school director who only weeks ago entertained a NBA team in his campus. "What is being assessed is our past performance. No attempt is made to mentor or hand hold the school for rectifying the gaps in quality as with international accreditation processes", the same director points out.

Road to Accreditation is Tough

International accreditation process in contrast is more proactive to the needs of the b-school even though the exercise is not easy and can be quite expensive too. A typical international accreditation effort would set back the b-school by a minimum of US $ 10,000, not to mention nearly US $ 2000 upwards in maintaining the accreditation certification year after year.

“We have a detailed pre-assessment process designed to highlight potential issues at an early stage. Preliminary data is scrutinised by the independent International Accreditation Advisory Board (IAAB). The School must then prepare a detailed self-audit document, under the guidance of a member of the Association’s accreditation services team, before an on-site peer review assessment of the school and its programmes is carried out,” explains Dr Mark Stoddard about the Association of MBAs accreditation process. Indian accreditation agencies NBA and NAAC despite the help of the state mandate on accreditation still could make much head way till last year when the total percentage of schools for instance covered by the NBA assessment process had not crossed 30 per cent of the total schools registered with the AICTE.

However thanks to a sudden revival of interest in international accreditation, the total number of schools wanting to take up accreditation had gone up significantly and according to NBA officials. International accreditation awareness increased dramatically after a two day international conference in Mumbai early in March attended by the top three accreditation agencies which was organized by Narsee Monjee University of Mumbai. Even AICTE acknowledges the global accreditation benchmark as a pre-condition before allowing Indian b-schools to enter into tie up with any foreign university or b-school. “I think it is time that Indian government tied up with international accreditation agencies to bring their quality norms to India”, comments Pritam Singh member of the National Board of Accreditation.