Top-notch management education is still restricted to the 20-25 crème-de-la-crème schools, which are just a sliver among the several thousand functional in the country. The differences between them are stark in terms of the curriculum, facilities and placement records.
Even among the top 100 in the BT-MDRA Best B-schools Survey 2021, there is a yawning gap between the average annual salary of students in the top 25 schools at Rs 19.63 lakh and the next 25 best schools' average of Rs 9.93 lakh. The subsequent two groups of 25 schools each average Rs 7.31 lakh and Rs 6.19 lakh in annual salary packages, respectively. The trend and the salary levels have stayed almost the same for the past three years, showing that the top 25 schools are really the exception.
Even these islands of excellence, as they are so often referred to, are fraught with challenges. For one, they are nowhere close to what a Harvard Business School or a Stanford Graduate School of Business does when it comes to data applications because India copies AI and ML models from the US, according to Gurugram-based MBA consultant Jatin Bhandari. His firm PythaGURUS Education coaches around 100 students every year to get into top B-schools in India and abroad. "We are far away from Silicon Valley, which is the epicentre of these developments. Right now, Indian B-schools waking up to data are in a position similar to the Indian IT industry 20 years ago as the back-end centre for developed countries."
People Director (India & South East Asia) Tanushree Mishra of beer maker AB InBev, a frequent recruiter at the top B-schools, agrees that the journey has just begun in India. "We need to move at the same speed as the world is… We need to be at the cutting edge of it rather than wait for Silicon Valley or Tel Aviv to first try it out and then copy that curriculum." Stuck with curriculum reviews that happen once in five years and two-year MBA programmes where course outlines, case materials and assessment methods are planned a year in advance, colleges agree they cannot respond fast enough to the changing industry demands. "There's always going to be a lag," says IIM Indore Director Himanshu Rai. Testing out changes in executive education could be a solution, he says, as they are of shorter duration and the feedback would come from students who continue to hold jobs in the industry. Yearly reviews and adding on courses from newer learning platforms to the regular course could be another way out, he adds.
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