India’s elite professional education institutes are expanding and multiplying, even as the economy slows down. The premier Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad plans to set up a second campus, at Mohali in Punjab, with an estimated investment of Rs 300 crore. The government in turn is setting up new institutes of technology and of management. Quantity, it would seem, will now be supported by quality. The challenge when it comes to technical and management education is no longer the availability of a sufficient number of seats for all candidates who can be considered eligible; in some areas, there is in fact a surplus and there is no shortage of private engineering colleges in southern states that have vacant seats; some of the colleges that could not get enough students have been converted into hotels! This suggests that, once the scarcity issue has been addressed, the market has begun to distinguish the good from the not-so-good—and that quality is now at a premium.
India produces more business school graduates than any country other than the US, and almost seven times the number of B-school graduates as the UK. However, a pan-India study by the Bangalore-based MeritTrac Services noted recently that while 1,400 B-schools produce 100,000 MBA graduates annually, only 23 per cent of them are truly employable. The majority end up doing entry-level sales jobs for which all you need is a good college degree, preferably in economics or commerce, and some sales training for a few months.
The situation is no different for engineering and technical graduates. Currently, only about 25 per cent of technical graduates and 10-15 per cent of general college graduates are considered suitable for employment in the offshore IT and BPO industries, respectively, if one goes by the assessment of the software body Nasscom.
Rapid proliferation in recent years, along with a defective certification process, has meant that the problem of poor quality has assumed daunting proportions; the institutes that offer quality professional education are in the minority. So it is just as well if that minority now spreads its wings. But putting up more campuses and buildings is not the primary answer. The more serious constraint relates to the availability of quality faculty, the resulting absence of research, and consequently a failure to figure in global rankings, with ISB being the stand-out exception. The existing Indian Institutes of Management have large campuses and many physical facilities, as do the Indian Institutes of Technology; if they cannot take in many more students, the critical constraint is the absence of enough good teachers. That explains why the IIMs account for less than 5 per cent of MBAs produced in India; indeed, this percentage may not change appreciably even after seven more IIMs are set up in the Eleventh Plan, which runs till 2012.
The IIM Review Committee (Bhargava report) underlines the same points. It notes that the quality and quantity of research papers from IIMs have not been commensurate with the status of IIMs and have not enabled IIMs to become thought leaders. Besides, IIMs have not been able to attract enough faculty, especially in the functional areas. And yet, India spends over Rs 24,000 crore on students who go overseas for higher studies. This is a subsidy that the country provides year after year to universities overseas, since they invariably charge overseas students multiples of the fees that apply to local nationals. If some of that money could be diverted back home, and invested in the lowest priority when anyone thinks of education (i.e. teachers), the key problems will begin to get solved. You cannot have teaching as a low-wage island and still hope to have the kind of faculty that is at the heart of any world-class educational institution.
