Indian B-schools grow only in quantity, not quality
New Delhi: Although there has been a tremendous increase in the number of B-schools that were set up post liberalization in India, not all these institutes provide quality education. According to Premchand Palety, the Chief Executive of the Centre for Forecasting and Research (C fore), a research agency, in 1991 there were only around 50 B-schools in the country, but between 1991 and 2000, the number rose to about 700. And between 2001 and 2009, the number swelled to about 2,000.
Quantitatively, it is an impressive growth story. However, the quality of education delivered in most of them is the disturbing aspect of this positive narrative, writes Palety in Wall Street Journal. The thorough research, which was carried out by Palety based on his experiences has revealed some startling aspects of B-schools. Not more than 30 B-schools in the country - about 1.5 percent of the total - have systems and processes in place to deliver quality education. The vast majority is inefficient teaching colleges and function primarily as placement agencies.
According to Palety, if there has been proliferation of dubious B-schools, one important contributing factor has been the 'License Raj' of the government's regulator, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). Under the council's rules, a newly-established business school can't admit more than 60 students in the first year and for subsequent incremental expansion, it needs a number of different permits. This rule, it seems, has been inspired by the philosophy of keeping capacity down to avert monopolies and to protect the small-scale entrepreneur, writes Palety.
With this constraint on student intake, institutes find it difficult to run a quality program without any aid. Yet government-aided autonomous B-schools like the Indian Institutes of Management, which don't have to seek AICTE approval for expansion, have been too complacent. Though they have expanded capacity somewhat in the past two years, they failed to do so for the better part of four decades. According to Palety, many shoddy B-schools quickly moved in to fill the space that the growing economy created. Some of them deliberately violated the law, luring students with misleading advertisements and admitting them without any approvals. Many of them routinely draw off major parts of the financial surplus they generate to unrelated activities instead of cultivating faculty or using it for improvement of the institute's systems.
Though the survey reveals the problems of B-schools in the country, it also has a silver lining to it. In the year 2000, it was found that more than 70 percent of B-schools that were surveyed didn't have a single faculty member who had authored a case or a research paper or a book. In this year's survey, 81 percent of the institutes had at least one faculty member who had authored a research paper that was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
There is also an improvement in faculty strength, interaction with industry, infrastructure and international linkages in some of them. About a decade ago, only about 20 B-schools had their own journals. Now, over 270 have one. On the flip side, not more than 10 of them are of an international standard. Beyond the top 25 B-schools, faculty publication in peer-reviewed international journals is almost non-existent. Entrepreneurship development continues to remain a neglected area. Of the 2,000 B-schools, not even 10 have an effective incubation centre to cultivate enterprise.
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