ISB among top 20 B-schools in the world: FT

The Indian School of Business (ISB) has become the first business school from the country to figure in the top 100 business schools ranked by the Financial Times.

The Hyderabad-based school has been ranked 20 on the list, a development that prompted ISB dean Rammohan Rao to declare at a press conference here that it was a "vision come true for the school".

"We now have international recognition which will help us in ramping up the number of foreign students, increase the strength of faculty and set up more research centres," Rao said.

In Hyderabad, deputy dean Ajit Rangnekar pointed out that international students accounted for 5 per cent of the total strength of 425 in the class of 2008, as compared with 25-50 per cent in top business schools elsewhere in the world.

Surprisingly, none of India's premier business schools, including the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), has ever made it to the annual FT list of top 100 business schools.

ISB is the only Indian institution to make it to the list and also the youngest (it started six years back). A possible explanation can lie in Rao's claim that the IIMs and the ISB are not comparable on account of an ISB student having at least five years of working experience, higher than their IIM counterparts.

At the top of the FT list is the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, followed closely by the London Business School.

The others include the Stanford University GSB, Harvard Business School, Insead, MIT Sloan, University of Chicago GSB, IESE Business School, Hong Kong UST Business School and HEC Paris among others.

The FT rankings assess business schools on parameters like success of alumni in terms of placements and pay, its record in generating ideas, placements, presence of international students and faculty, research work among others.

Savita Mahajan, associate dean, ISB, claimed that earlier the US-based business schools used to dominate the FT top 20 list. In the latest FT ranking, as many as 11 schools, including ISB, are not from the US, but from the United Kingdom, Spain, France, India, China and others.

ISB is now planning to ramp up the number of permanent faculty to 40-50, up from the present 25 (it has 106 visiting faculty). The institute, which started with 125 students in 2002, plans to increase the intake to 450 next year, and to 560 in 2009.

The ISB, unlike other business schools in the country, accepts only Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) scores for admissions.