The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Can management school rankings be trusted?

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Saturday, Nov 25, 2006
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Karnataka - Bangalore

Can management school rankings be trusted?

Rasheed Kappan

`Only an academic/professional expert can judge the quality of an institution'

BANGALORE: With the Common Admission Test (CAT) taken care of, the focus of MBA aspirants has now shifted to the top management schools other than the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). But there are questions to be asked: Are these B-schools good enough? Does their quality justify the high ranking given by private agencies, and can these rankings be trusted at all?

The All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) does not have a high regard for the rankings. "All over the world, technical and management education rankings are done by professionals. Only an academic/professional expert can judge the quality of an institution," AICTE chairman Damodar Acharya told The Hindu. The AICTE, he said, was never involved in ranking.

"It is the market and the students who will rank the institutions. Students have their own system of ranking. Our job is to create enough opportunities. That is the only way we can allow the market to operate," he said.

But another senior AICTE official was open to the ranking system provided it was objective. The council, he indicated, proposed to help the B-schools post information on their faculty, infrastructure, admission process and other details on the AICTE website. Boosting transparency was the idea.

Objectivity and reliance have emerged as key factors in the ranking arena. Hory Shankar Mukherjee, a member of faculty of Al-Ameen College, said, "Another magazine has come out with B-school rankings, and it is contrary to what the previous publication had said. Students are left more confused than before." He suggested that students should not focus too much on the ranking system but rely on information collected on the ground.

Verification

Many participants at a recent seminar on B-school rankings organised by the Bangalore-based IFIM B-School found ranking a useful exercise, but only if done objectively. "The surveys should reflect the ground situation on the school's intellectual capital, infrastructure, faculty profile and so on. But these have to be verified and documented. Right now, data collection is not followed up with verification and there is no uniformity of parameters or methodology among different surveys," said M.R. Gopalan, director, Research, IFIM B-School.

As Jayantee Mukherjee Saha, Department of Management Studies, Bharathidasan Institute of Management, put it, "B-school rankings are based on only a few parameters. The agency conducting the survey decides on the parameters on which quantitative weightages are assigned. For instance, the different parameters that are considered across various agencies are infrastructure, intellectual capital, placements, industry interface, and satisfaction index (of students). But one major dimension — the quality of the working life of employees — is ignored."

Private ranking agencies depend on perceptions of MBA students, young executives and functional heads to arrive at different parameters.

But perceptions of MBA students could vary, based on how a student is viewed in a B-school, said Shahida P. of PES Institute of Technology. "Treating students as customers may compromise on course content and rigours of learning.

"Treating them as products characterises students as too passive and accepting. A student could also be viewed as a stakeholder who has a vested interest in acquiring higher education," she said.

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