Is your MBA worth it? Only 7% of India's B-school graduates employable, says study

Barring a handful of top business schools like the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), most business-schools in the country are producing sub-par graduates who are largely un-employable and therefore earning less than Rs 10,000 a month, if at all they find a job, a report has pointed out.

The report blames the lack of quality control and infrastructure, low-paying jobs through campus placement and poor faculty as the major reasons behind India's unfolding B-school disaster.

India has at least 5,500 B-schools operational at present, but including unapproved institutes could take that number much higher, the report by Assocham said, expressing concern over the decay in the standards of these B-schools.

"Only 7% of MBA graduates from Indian business schools, excluding those from the top 20 schools, get a job straight after completing their course," it found.

The report says that only 7% of the MBA graduates are actually employable.

"Around 220 B-schools have shut down in the last two years in Delhi-NCR (National Capital Region), Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Dehradun etc. And at least 120 more are expected to wind up in 2016," it said.

"Low education quality coupled with the economic slowdown, from 2014 to 2016, campus recruitments have gone down by a whopping 45%," the study revealed.

In the last five years, the number of B-school seats has tripled. In 2015-16, these schools offered a total of 5,20,000 seats in MBA courses, compared to 3,60,000 in 2011-12.

The report observed that while on an average each student spends nearly Rs 3-5 lakh on a two-year MBA programme, their current monthly salary is a measly Rs 8,000 to Rs 10,000.

"Even the quality of IIM/IIT students coming out now compared to last 15 years has come down due to the quality of school education. The faculty is also another problem as few people enter the teaching profession due to low salaries and the entire eco-system needs to be revamped," said the report.

"The quality of higher education in India across disciplines is poor and does not meet the needs of the corporate world," Assocham Secretary General D S Rawat said.

The report also observed that out of 15 lakh engineering graduates India produces every year, 20-30% of them do not find jobs and many other get jobs well below their technical qualification.