The Case of inertia and insolvent b-schools in Management Education

There are many concerns of MBA/Management institutions in India who are classified under the 2nd or 3rd categories - going by the way they fail to measure up to any standard of perceived quality or their inability to get students for their programs.

The Biggest problem for these institutions is - PERCEPTION.

It's something like a shadow for these colleges - they can't shake it off anytime easily and it will always stick around.

So how is it even possible to help these institutions get better or top-grade themselves??

In the past 2-3 years that I have been interacting with these institutions, there are a few things that I have noticed as the bottlenecks which stopped them to do anything "good":

- Lack of vision: The top team or the owner have no vision to become better, while missing out the point that only by being better will they survive and earn more money/revenues

- Blindly copying others: This is the "herd" behavior that keeps things like "education tours" alive. Surprisingly, they are yet to figure out that by copying activities that others do, they "place" themselves into the same herd or group as others, and run into the same cliches every year

- Underestimating the ecology: Cocooned inside their own institutions and geographies, they have this self-defeating idea that everything will work out if they manage to get more local students interested in their college, and sometimes they believe that like some other bschools, they will easily get to convince people with less knowledge on MBA, jobs after MBA, life after MBA, etc.

- No measurement of what works for them and what not: There is a very famous saying by a person which goes as - "I know that I have wasted half my money this year that I invested in marketing, but the trouble is I don't know which half". This is the exact situation for these b-schools. They don't know what really worked and what didn't. They don't know if 10 visits to a city yielded anything in the short-term as well as long-term. Will the visits-to-be-made be lesser next year since they made 10 visits; or will that remain the same?

- They don't have a plan for their batch improvement: Every year, their batch needs to be profiled like every other b-school. The trouble is that the profiling never happens correctly. There are no answers to questions like - What are the contribution %ages of CAT/MAT/XAT/Other exams in your batch, and what are the ranges of each of these scores? Also, what are the new regional representations in your batch this year, and have you lost out on any specific representation from last year?(Diversity)

It is a fact that the ecology of the domain and the trends in related fields will affect the survival of the b-schools.

Some questions that these b-schools need to seriously attempt to answer are:

What happens if CAT is conducted for more than 2 months? What happens if CMAT is conducted all round the year?

What happens if the state gets more broadband access in home PCs, mobiles, and internet cafes?

What will be the impact of the usage improvement amongst local population who can now search and find better colleges and information of life after MBA?

What will happen to the kids who would join you and then don't get jobs after 2 years? Will you not train them properly enough to empower them for using Internet/social media? Will they then not have the power and the intentions to bad-mouth you everywhere they can? How will you ever stop from that happening? Will that kid be not responsible for making your college lose applications even before they applied?

What will happen to your college's local population when local population start applying to other colleges outside your city and state? How will you handle newer colleges with more money power coming to your state, or worse, multiple campuses of established names in your city/state?

What will happen if there is a steady decline of the representation from CAT/MAT and other exams in your batch along with the %ile scores and you are not aware of it? How will you feel when you will get companies to come and they will go back empty handed without recruiting?


After trying to answer the above, they should then ponder upon the following:

How will you feel if you can place all your students into excellent profiles in good companies through your placements process? Will that not be something great?

How will you like it, when your own students/alumni will contribute to getting more quality admissions and placements? Wont that be a dream come true?

How will you like it, when your college can increase fee to accommodate better faculty, infra, corporate programs, and still you get some of the best people to apply to you year on year?

Over 140,000 applicants in CAT this year will again be of people with work-exp and the availability of seats for them are less - when you compare the number of institutions that they feel are available to them to apply.

Can't they be one of those (perceived) better quality institution for these applicants?