Brand & Quality in Management Education

Author: Prof. V.G. Sarangan, Professor & PGP Chairperson, SMOT School of Business, Chennai

Every other person in the field of Management education would instantaneously agree with the view that effectiveness and efficiency of the graduates, coming out of any B-school / Department of Management studies of a college or University, has been on the decline. Of late, such an opinion is fast getting firmed up in the minds of employers. Why so? 

The spontaneous response that would come out is the ‘proliferation of Institutions’ that have made this course utterly commercial and a ‘money-spinner’ while ignoring the ‘value-additions’ that the course ought to have made in the personality of the graduates who went through the rigor. To me, this logic of excess commercialization has not been completely convincing. While I agree partially with the fact that ‘value-additions’ are not happening, the commercialization would not have happened if the demand for seats was not there. 

This leads us to think whether we were totally wrong in estimating the demand for professional managers in the country and to a certain extent, outside India? Did we pitch it at a very high number, while trying to understand the macro-economic growth indicators? Is it a fall-out of the downward revision of growth statistics that happened towards the start of this decade? Or could it be our (Indian) usual ‘thinking as a herd’ attitude that drove the educationists (!) / ‘academic entrepreneurs’ to get into the ‘rush’ to start and offer the course without creating a proper infrastructural back-up in the form of teachers, course materials, research reports, and a good workable pedagogy? Is it any one of these factors or a combination of some of them or a hideous concoction of all of them that has contributed to the eventual decline in the professional quality of young managers? 

The next, often publicized argument of ‘supply’ outstripping the ‘demand’ due to the recent  influx of more than 4000 institutions in the field of management education all over the country (within the last 8 to 10 years!), thereby making MBA a common course or ‘just another’ qualification, is even more unacceptable. Precisely because of the single reason that even if half or one third of the said 4000 institutions had concentrated on the ‘deliverables’, as many Institutions claim to have focused on, the graduates would have come out as better professionals and the ‘demand point’ in the cycle, would have gone up again by the sheer effectiveness of such fresh ‘professional employees’. The market for any product or service has got the potential to correct itself very quickly. 

Logically extending the thoughts, it is quiet evidential that the two major factors that contributed to the decline of quality are (I) a heavy compromise that has been made in the process of selecting the aspiring candidates and (II) a gross negligence on creating a strong reserve of academic resources in any form whatsoever.  Leave out the top rung institutions at this stage for a while. They get the ‘creamy’ segment of the students aspiring to join them. Even among them a filtering is done and the best is taken; trained (incidentally, what value addition is really taking place is a million dollar question here!); placed in well paying big organizations and that group in return takes care of juniors. The cycle is very well ‘maintained’ there. 

The institutions or departments of colleges at the next levels face the real challenge. They have to admit the students of ‘above average’ to ‘good’ levels; give them extremely good inputs; make them equal or in many occasions better; encourage employers to recruit them and see to it that their ‘products’ are consistently performing even during challenging times. It is very obvious that they cannot do so, year after year, unless their academic resource base (materials, methods and members of faculties) is very strong. Hence it is very much clear that a focus on the second factor of excellence in academic resource would supplement the deficiency if any, created by the first factor of compromise in selection of students. 

Only in cases of institutions where both the factors are not cared for and a very short sighted approach is prevailing the ‘product quality’ will be continuously affected.  Such institutions are more in number and they send out large groups of name sake ‘graduates’ who contribute to the generally negative thought process of the employers as well as the society. Sooner or later the negative spiral would set in for such institutions. But even before that, the ‘spoilage’ or damage they do to the employment market and to the admissions process of some of the committed second or third level institutions would be very heavy. 

It is the duty of teams of thinkers, objectively minded academicians and social group leaders to bring out this anomaly to the forefront and highlight the significance of setting up and adhering to some quality norms in both selection and deliverables. Initially, there would be stiff opposition to any change. The promoters of academic institutions may like to wish away the first factor under the disguise of ‘healthy minimum numbers’ and ‘economies of scale’, the second one may be left unattended with a counter argument that ‘duly qualified’ faculty is difficult to get and the research work in Management studies are at a ‘fledgling’ stage. [Incidentally, for management education, the post-graduation in that field is enough a qualification to teach according to the higher education monitoring bodies and more of practicing managers are welcome rather than pure academicians to give values of problem solving.]   

My questions to the people who profound such defensive arguments is that “were you not able to understand this phenomenon when you started the department or the institution?”; “were you not able to predict at least that we would get to this stage very soon?”; “ having considered the proposition of offering MBA education as a pure business or commercial venture, don’t you know that like any other business the ‘input quality’ is what ultimately determines the long term acceptability of your ‘product’ in the market?”; “what has been done in or by your institution or department to sustain the quality?”  Interestingly, there are some Business schools who are - small but committed to the cause of quality education; who have developed excellent teams of regular, adjunct and visiting  faculty members (sometimes, equal to the number of students in the classes!); possess a very well-designed curriculum which is up to date; an affiliation or association with an accredited Indian or Western University; a very consistently decent placement record of over 90%; and a fairly supportive, affordable fee structure and a good set of satisfied alumni and last but not the least an excellent infrastructure- awaiting a good level of admissions. They should be given a chance to prove that the ‘professional quality’ cannot decline if there is an equal commitment from the Institution as well as the student community towards achieving excellence in their pursuits and no relenting at any cost. In fact, such institutions only add ‘value’ to the individuals and the nation over a period of time.