It’s easy to get carried away by the spike in the placement pay-cheques of the top B-school students who graduated in 2008. For, the average 20 per cent rise in salaries flies in the face of slowdown fears. The rosy numbers, published in this year’s All India Management Association’s Best B-school Survey, in association with this newspaper, show once again that industry’s demand for high-quality managers continues to exceed supply. What makes the jump in salaries even more impressive is that it does not take into account the offers from international companies.
The results will surely lift the spirits of all B-school aspirants, but the survey does well to go beyond the hype and drive home the point that the real impact of the slowdown could be seen only during the next placement season — a point summed up well by IIM Ahmedabad Director Sameer Barua when he says that even in March, recruiters had not come to appreciate the far-reaching impact of the sub-prime crisis in the US. Six months later, the flame of optimism is flickering, but it’s heartening that most of the top B-schools are innovating fast to cushion the blow of a slowing economy when the placement season starts in November-December this year. That explains the initiatives to look beyond traditional recruiters like the financial services heavyweights and courting start-ups and foreign firms outside the US.
Prospects of salary increases are only one part of the overall story and the AIMA survey has several other key takeaway points. It’s different from similar other exercises as it does not rank institutes and only classifies them into different groups according to their performance on parameters ranging from intellectual capital to industry interface. That’s important as the survey serves as a checklist for students, institutes and recruiters and less as a contest in which even a minor data aberration can change the rank of an institute and give a distorted picture. For example, the checklist tells us that a few schools like FMS Delhi and IMT Ghaziabad are catching up fast with the IIMs on critical areas like research, campus infrastructure and innovative learning. And surprisingly, many more teachers at the lesser-known institutes (classified as Group C+ in the survey) have more industry experience than those at the higher end of the ladder. Also, the slowdown has made an impact on industry interaction as the number of consultancy projects and management development programmes has dipped, as much as by half in some high-order groups.
These are interesting findings, but the fact is such surveys have obvious limitations because their coverage is limited only to the mainstream B-schools that have managed to carve out successful niches for themselves. At a time when management courses are mushrooming, such limited surveys can often fail to give a holistic view. For example, it’s a fact that the general quality of education, reflected in the knowledge base and skill set of the management graduates churned out by a majority of the institutes, is plummeting. That’s because the permission to set up B-schools has been granted indiscriminately, resulting in a diminishing control over quality. Thus, recruiters’ choices are widening only in numerical terms. Only about a fifth of the 1,120 B-schools approved by the All India Council of Technical Education make it to the serious recruiter’s list.