 "Jose Aldrich, Acting Dean, College of Business at Florida International University")
Jose Aldrich, Acting Dean, College of Business at Florida International University, which was recently ranked fifth among the best undergraduate international programmes in the US News & World Report’s 2017 edition of Best Colleges, is in India to meet the faculty at India’s top IIMs, at a time when his B-school starts to take baby-steps in creating a branded presence in the Indian market. In a chat with Sohini Das, Aldrich says how a competitive educational environment in India can open doors to foreign varsities like his to attract talent from here.
How significant is India in particular and Asia in general for you outside your main campus? How has business grown from this part of the world and why?
India and China are both very important. The Asian market for us is very important, because we see the Asian market not only from an educational perspective but also from an economic perspective. We teach our students global business, global strategy, direction, we have a focus that is very strong on Latin America. We see that China and India are going to be very significant players in the global economy in the next several years, they will be really dominating from an economic perspective on a global basis when you take both of those economies together. China has taken a big step forward, and we deal with China a lot now. But, what we are seeing is that a lot of Indian companies are also expanding. For us it is really important to focus on Asia Pacific and the two big economies here, China and India.
What kind of presence do you have in India in terms of academic collaboration, research collaboration, executive education among others. Which of these do you look to grow most in and how? Are there plans of having any campus here?
Our plans are really to exchange students, have faculty interchanges as well because that creates that richness of culture and the key is when you look at it from a global perspective is that students need to know how to do business in different cultures. Interchange and exchange of students extremely important. We have tremendous diversity in our classrooms in FIU. We have faculty and students from all over the world.
Research is also very imporant to us; we are a Carnegie One (Carnegie Research Classification) institution, one of the highest levels in the US. The real issue is how do we line up that research, and we see a great opportunities with our Indian counterparts and faculty to engage in that interchange of research.
Some of our faculties could come down here and teach a course; may be looking at how we can collaborate on courses, on executive education and other areas. Campus presence, am not sure if we are going to be there in the next five to ten years. We do have a campus in Tianjin, China; we have an MBA programme from FIU in Panama, in Jamaica. We are looking at may be at Columbia now. But sending our faculty all the way to India for that, its not probably our market. We would rather look at collaborating with institutions here, like the IIMs. We are working on having dual degrees and exchange programmes with some of the Chinese universities, as we are doing now in India.
How many Indian students are there in the College of Business in FIU?
In the Business School, I don't have the exact number, but may be 50-60 students now. In our Masters programme we have about 2000 students, and our under-graduate programme has around 8,000 students. We want to grow that number, we want more Indian students.
Your location in Miami is quite strategic when it comes to access to Latin America. Is that how you plan to position yourself when you visit Indian campuses as the edge over other US varsities?
Yes, we have an edge over other universities because of that connection that we have. We also have an edge that our university is 65 per cent Hispanic students, it gives us that cultural edge. It also is where we are positioned geographically, we are at the cross-roads of Latin America. Miami is developing as an international city. It is developing into that city with a lot of trade coming in through Panama Canal, we have very strong trading partners in Latin America and our economy depends a lot on that flow.
How different and evolved is management education in India vis-a-vis western markets in terms pedagogy, research, faculty strength, placements and return on investment?
Am not an expert on that. Do not know the Indian methods. But, from what I understand from my meetings here, is that there is more commonality than difference in approach. It is the case study method, similar pedagogy, similar type of classes, the know-how is pretty similar to what we are teaching on a global basis. Student-teacher ratio too is pretty similar; ours is about 30-40 students in class versus one faculty member; which is what they have here as well. Here you got international faculty as well.
How difficult or challenging is it for a western university to set up a campus here in India; is it feasible?
For now, the best way is collaboration and partnerships. To set up our own campus, we are not in a position to compete for students here. Am not sure if from the regulatory perspective we are allowed to do that. We have quite a few Indian faculty in our US centre; of the 147 full-time faculty at the College of Business, at least 10-15 per cent are Indian.
Unlike the western markets where MBA programs for mostly targeted towards executives with work experience, India is more of a market for freshers. When you start exchange programmes here, what role can this play?
In the US, a recent trend is that a lot of the MBA programmes primarily, the experience level historically is that students have practical experience of about three to five years or so. They tend to learn more during the MBA as they can relate the concepts to actual practical experience. But, we have also got MBA programmes that do not require significant work experience, may be a year or even zero. So, when we are looking at exchange programmes, what is important is that Indian students would be in a class with others who have work experience; that would be a great plus.
Business education in India is very placement driven. How are things in the US, and how will this work with exchange students?
An exchange student would have the opportunity to sit for placements in the US depending on the programme. For our masters programme, students are already working, they come in the evenings. Our students are going to benefit a great deal from the Indian students as well, because of the very high placements that you have here as opposed to the US where it is more diluted. We are working with the top-notch B-schools here. It's about the packages that they get; we struggle a little more; some of our students who are already placed, but even after five years they do not get the kind of packages that students from IIMs are coming out with. Our objective is to place our students.
Would you opt for placements for your exchange students here?
Yes, if they could do that, that would be great opportunity for our students, particularly with the large companies that are working all over the world, like Tatas.
What kind of business size are you anticipating from India going forward (in terms of seats, collaboration, etc)?
It's a huge market, if we do this right. When we go to the top institutes of management here, we see they get thousands of applications and very few students get admitted. There is tremendous talent here that go to these universities. It is not just partnering with these universities but starting to create that branded presence in this market to attract more Indian students. The competitive environment that you have here for education opens the door for universities like ours to attract students from here who do not make it to the top universities here, but are excellent.
Have you thought of any India-specific courses?
We have identified some areas, like healthcare. Florida has a growing healthcare industry. Other areas are cloud computing, and business analytics. We have a healthcare MBA, healthcare informatics programmes.
What is the share of executive education in your revenues now, and how do you plan to grow?
It is still very low, around 5 per cent of our revenues from executive education. We are looking to grow that to 10-15 per cent. I was surprised that the IIMs here have almost 40 per cent of their revenues from executive education. That would be ideal. Currently, nearly 60 per cent of our revenues come from the masters programmes which are what we call market-rate programmes, while our under-graduate programmes are subsidised to a certain extent.
