To avoid distracting students.
From the next academic year, the Indian School of Business (ISB) will invite companies to visit the campus for placements in February or March, and the process will continue till June.
At present, the institute holds placements from January and the process continues till March. However, ISB Dean Ajit Rangnekar believes this practise distracts students from academics. The extended placements drive, he believes, will also give students enough time to identify a job or domain of their choice.
“We should look at a long-enough period during which students can identify the right job. Currently, they are grabbing offers that come their way because it is Day-1, Day-2 and so on. Why do they have to do that? After all, the decision will have a bearing on the rest of their career,” he explains.
In 2009, ISB had extended the placements season indefinitely due to poor attendance of companies, which were hit by the global economic slowdown. “We have always done rolling placements. Any global school will have placements going on for three months after graduation. The same will also continue here,” he says, hinting that the placements season for the current batch at ISB will extend by at least three months to June. The students complete their course in April.
“Students get jobs by March or April. What if they decide not to take up those offers and wait for other offers? We will be happy to support them,” he adds.
The dean says the placements at ISB this year are much better than last year. Consulting and technology sectors have come back strongly and marketing is also up. But “finance is as bad as it was”. Other sectors like healthcare are doing well, he says. “Many high-quality international companies have come to the campus for recruitment this year. Last year, the international market was down,” he notes, adding: “Of course, there are significant career shifts this year too.”
He, however, refused to give any numbers. “As a rule, we do not give out numbers. The salary of one student cannot be assigned to the entire institute,” he says.
ISB also subscribes, like some other top B-schools, to the view that the salary or package a particular student gets in a particular year does not mean much. “The highest salary is meaningless. There are all kinds of nonsensical assumptions about salary figures. They actually distort information. For the last three years, we have almost banned divulging the salary figure,” he said.
Rangnekar feels a range of salaries is more indicative in nature. “Median salaries by sector are more important. Mean salaries can be misleading sometimes,” he says. Last year, ISB had announced both median and mean salaries.
Then how is performance of a B-School judged? “First, salary should never be a parameter to gauge the performance of a student or of a B-school. We should look at long-term successes. This is one of the reasons why we subscribe to the Financial Times (FT) rankings — because it looks at how well the students are doing after three years after graduation,” he explains, adding that the contribution of alumni to the corporate and social sector is a parameter for measuring performance.
ISB was ranked 12th in the global B-school rankings released by FT this January, 15th in 2009 and 20th in 2008.
A student’s performance should also be gauged by how happy they are three or five years after completion of the course. “Imagine a situation where I get an opportunity to transform rural lives and get paid only Rs 15 lakh versus a job where I sit in air-conditioned confines and get Rs 20 lakh, with a limited role. The happiness quotient of changing many lives is obviously more. We simply cannot put salary as an indicator,” he reasons.
The formalities for the next batch (2011) are over. It will have a strength of about 560. The school is also getting good response for its PGP-Max, an executive education programme for people with 15 years of work experience, he says. “Restricting the class size to 60 is a challenge now,” he says.
