The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Business schools urged to reorient education

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Feb 26, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Business schools urged to reorient education

Special Correspondent

If you create rat races, you will produce rats, says expert If you create rat races, you will produce rats: expert

CHENNAI: "Today we tend to think by the bucket approach," said C.R. Muthukrishnan of IIT-Madras at a seminar on `Rethinking Management Education' organised here on Friday.

"We think that the more we give education, the better it is. But it's not more but better that we must focus on."

Business schools must find the right kind of unique selling propositions and select students for their strengths. "If you create rat races, you will produce rats. We have to reorient ourselves towards management education, think out of the box and create a well defined value proposition for students," he said. Academician N. Rangarajan said that business schools had become placement shops and students just needed to demonstrate competitiveness to enter the institute but not to get out of it.

"The MBAs have become a hot commodity, ranking is based on return on investment and schools are just hiring halls, expensive employment agencies. There is no linkage between what is taught and what is applied on the job," he said, talking on practices in management schools. They were playing games with distorted rankings, he said.

The meet was organised by Rai Business School and Lason India. D.Jayakumar, Vice President, Lason India, said that academic qualification fitting into industry requirement was a classic case of square fitting a round hole. There was a huge gap between what the industry wants and what the institutes give. "From mass production, we have to get into product-isation," he said.

This would help human resource teams to sieve out the ordinary from the extraordinary, he said.

Earlier, the former Chief Election Commissioner, T.N. Seshan, emphasised on the need to teach leadership and the importance of creativity. "Students do not attend classes because they already have got the job," he said.

Taking questions during an interaction session that followed, he said though there were not many people competent to teach, the teacher is looked down upon.

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