ICFAI to train students to be teachers

The Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India (ICFAI) has adopted a three-pronged strategy to address the problem of attrition among its faculty members.

The strategy includes training students every year who would be inducted into its faculty, payment of higher salaries and creation of opportunities for faculty members to work in reputed institutions abroad.

ICFAI's Institute for Management Teachers (IMT) recruits 50 students every year who will be eventually awarded a doctorate degree and employed as assistant professors. But, as per the agreement, they should serve the institute at least for a period of five years after completing their studies. The first batch of IMT has joined ICFAI faculty this year.

During the four-year study period, IMT pays its students a fellowship of Rs 25,000 per month. Of the four years, they will be sent to a reputed institution abroad for one year during which period the institute pays a stipend of $1,500 per month besides covering their travel and insurance expenditure.

As ICFAI is expanding its operations, the institute now proposes to set up IMTs in Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi this year in addition to the existing one at Hyderabad.

"We are trying to forge alliances with reputed foreign educational instructions for this purpose," ICFAI University vice-chancellor, V Panduranga Rao, told Business Standard.

Coming to the salary levels, Rao said the institute had examined the salary structure as well as the career-path of the teaching staff of various institutions including IITs and IIMs. It was found that the careers of faculty members in various reputed institutes in the country were stagnating at the age of 45.

Keeping this in view, ICFAI had created a career-path for its faculty that stretches up to the age of 65. Instead of three scales that exist in the structure of the University Grants Commission (UGC), 13 scales were created.

In the process, the basic salary of the teaching staff at ICFAI would go up to Rs 54,000 per month as against a maximum of Rs 25,000 under the UGC scales.

This apart, Rao said, ICFAI had introduced built-in incentive structures for faculty members. For instance, a faculty member is allowed to undertake private consultancy work for one day every week. If a faculty member published an article in a peer-reviewed foreign journal, he would be paid Rs 50,000.

The teaching staff would be rewarded even if they published articles in the institute's internal journals. The institute was also giving grants if anybody came forward to take up independent research and development activities.

The third strategy ICFAI has adopted is to create opportunities for the faculty members to work in reputed institutions abroad. For this, it has introduced a system of awarding credits for each article published besides giving the incentive amount.

If any faculty member published an article in a foreign journal, he would be awarded two credits for it. Anyone securing 8 credits would be sent to a foreign institute for a period of one semester.

"Everything here is performance-based. You perform, you get rewarded," Rao said.