Canadian B-school opens at GMR airport in Hyderabad

India is one of the fastest-growing markets for MBA education in the world, a top official of Canada's Schulich School of Business at York University said on Friday.

"The fastest-growing markets for MBA education is emerging economies and among them obviously China and India. More so India, with its demography where there is over 50 per cent of population that is below 25 years old," said Dezso J. Horvath, Dean and Tanna H. Schulich Chair in Strategic Management at the Schulich School of Business, York University.

Speaking to Business Today on Friday, after the opening of the building of the Schulich School of Business set up along with the GMR School of Business in the facility provided by the GMR Group at its airport in Hyderabad, Horvath said: "We are not coming here to compete with Indian business schools. Our focus is on meeting industry needs for globally trained students."

The average age of students at the institute is around 29 years with most having five to seven years of work experience. "We have international faculty and we train students for a global marketplace," Horvath said. He said that the first-year course is taught in India and second year in Toronto.

Emphasising that the school offers several differentiators, Horvath said, "We also provide a huge amount of specialisation options with 150 electives, 21 different specialisations with many of them in industry sectors which nobody else in the world is delivering such as in mining and soon in agro-business also."

Admission to the school is based on work experience and GMAT score, which would be around 670-680 on average. The fees is around Rs 30 lakh for the two years with options for student loans and scholarships for bright students. The first batch was admitted last year and will graduate by the end of April 2015 with 37 students in the batch. The second batch of 46 students has just joined. "We will keep the batch size to not more than 50," says Horvth.

Horvath said the school in India has an advisory board with leading industry leaders like G.M. Rao, Chairman of GMR Group; Ratan Tata, Chairman-Emeritus of Tata Sons; O.P. Bhatt, for SBI chairman; Bahram Vakil, Founding Partner of AZB & Partners; Uday Kotak, Executive Director and MD, Kotak Mahindra Bank; V. Raghunathan, CEO, GMR Varalakshmi Foundation, among others.

Horvath also said if India enacts a law to allow foreign players to set up own campuses, the Canadian institute will develop a full campus here and deliver the full programme here. "We will bring 50 per cent of students from abroad here and create a global school where half the total students come from all over the world and the rest from India and develop specialisations focused on India like IT."