The conveniences and affordability of a blended MBA notwithstanding, these partly online and partly on-campus programmes which are gaining traction in management education are missing a vital component that on-campus programmes offer—campus placements.
Even the ePGP courses from IIMA and IIM Raipur don’t offer campus placements. This means that while working executives get a leg up in their career after the course, freshers have to start job hunting. “Blended MBAs rarely offer placement services,” says Ranjan Banerjee, Dean, BIT School of Management (BITSoM). “Since they are targeted more at currently employed people, the target audience is different and, hence, not strictly comparable.”
Be that as it may, there is another factor that freshers have to ponder as they go job hunting—does a blended MBA degree hold the same value in the job market as a regular one?
“When it comes to blended MBA, freshers will probably be at a disadvantage as most companies will probably not give as much value to elected or online as offline, assuming that both are coming from equally represented institutes,” says professor Pradyumana Khokle, Organizational Behaviour, IIMA. “But if we talk about working professionals, we see a large number who have had professional growth sometimes halfway through the programme, sometimes immediately after the programme.”
While it may seem that blended MBA courses are better suited for working executives, some experts say it’s a matter of time before the stigma of an online degree vanishes.
“With the progression of digitisation in higher education and more and more top-ranked B-schools offering blended MBAs in specialised fields, duly approved by regulatory authorities, recruiters are going to give equal importance to the blended master’s degree in the future,” says professor Ashutosh Dash, Lead-GP Admissions, Management Development Institute (MDI) Gurgaon. It’s a viewpoint that BITSoM’s Banerjee concurs with.
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