Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad has stormed into the latest Financial Times’ Global MBA Rankings at an awesome 11th position, ahead of such elite institutions as the University of Chicago Booth Business School, the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and several others. IIMA has debuted into the global b-school stratosphere two spots ahead of another home-grown star, the Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business, which has incidentally dropped a position this year but is still placed high enough to shock and awe critics especially in the United States who tend to dismiss these rankings.
The London-based Financial Times newspaper clubs business schools across the world irrespective of the duration of the programme they offer and is often accused by US-based critics of favouring non-US business schools in its rankings which swing wildly in some cases each year. John A Byrne, a former editor of Businessweek magazine, who pioneered b-school rankings, has written, for example, “There are 14 new schools that made the Financial Times’ 2011 list. Seven of them achieved ranks this year that would have required double-digit increases to make the top 100, including the Indian Institute of Management, which debuted with an 11th place ranking. That means if the IIM just missed last year’s Financial Times’ list and was ranked 101st, it had to jump 90 places to gain a ranking of 11.”
That said, though, Byrne is on record having said earlier that for his money he would opt for the FT rankings, if he had to choose just one set, over those offered by Businessweek, Forbes and the Economist magazines. And while IIMA has been placed 11 in overall rankings, it is at a heady number two in terms of average alumni salary and number three in salary increase as a percentage of the pre-MBA salary.
With an astounding 650 plus aspirants competing for every seat, the IIMA has, in any case, been much, much tougher to get into than the toughest of US schools which admit at least six percent of applicants every session. The FT rankings, then, seem to have merely acknowledged facts of demonstrated merit. While critics can still look deeper and dissect the FT’s methodology, there is a timely lesson here for the Indian government.
The minister concerned, Kapil Sibal, has recently acknowledged that the eight new IITs have been beset by poor infrastructure which has made it difficult for them to retain faculty. It takes time to build institutions. It is not always possible to replicate the success of an institution in another location either. IIMA has made the cut in FT’s rankings 50 years after it was established – the Indian School of Business, which is just 10 years old, is perhaps the only exception of its kind across the world.
IIMA admits just around 250 students to its flagship programme. The situation is no better at the other IIMs. In contrast, the total enrolment at Harvard Business School is 942; at Wharton Business School it is 817; at Columbia Business School it is 737; at Kellogg School of Management it is 530; and so on. Significantly, none of these US-based business schools started out with as many seats. They have expanded over the years, introduced new programmes and increased the number of seats for their full-time MBA programmes as well.
The situation is even more critical when it comes to medical education in India as the premier institution in the country, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences admits just 50 students to its MBBS programme. Of these 50, 16 seats are reserved for the Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and the foreign nationals nominated by the central government. That leaves all of 34 seats in the general category and thousands of students who deserve admission but are left out by the cruel paucity of seats.
Little wonder then, Indian students flock to and are happily accepted at all leading programmes across the world. Instead of setting up new institutions, or at least along with setting up new institutions, the government should therefore seriously look at expanding the IIMs, IITs, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and our other such few centres of excellence.
