A Letter To All B-School Stakeholders, With Love

As someone who is going through the curriculum, who is sailing in the same boat as fellow b-school brothers and sisters, I decided to pen this down.

Let’s get straight to the point.

1. Placement committees cheat. It’s an open secret. They consider it as their right to get into top firms because according to them they slog hard. College authorities are busy filling some survey ranking forms to project their institute as one of the premier b-schools in India. They care for the 100% placement mark & not anything else.

2. How many b-schools get their placement reports verified by an external agency? How many of them follow the Indian Placement Reporting Standards (IPRS)? Out of the myriad of b-schools in India, only 10 have their placement reports IPRS audited. Yeah, just 10!

Following are these institutes:

Institute Name	Placement Report Audited by
IIM Ahmedabad	CRISIL
IIM Udaipur	Sorab S. Engineer & Co.
SPJIMR Mumbai	CRISIL
Sahyadri Institute Of Management Studies Pune	CRISIL
Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development	CRISIL
T A Pai Management Institute Manipal	CRISIL
Kirloskar Inst of Advanced Mgt Studies	M/S P. G. Bhagwat, Chartered Accountants
Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneswar	CRISIL
Symbiosis Institute of Business Management, Pune	CRISIL
IIM Rohtak	CRISIL

What about the other institutes? Where is the Placement Report of IIM Luckow? Institutes making tall claims need to do this fact check.

3. It is high time that Placement Committees are scrapped in entirety and are replaced by an external agency. The placement work of an institute can be either outsourced to an external agency or an in-house team of professionals can look after this important task. This team will be answerable to college authorities and will not do any special favours to any of the participating students. The students can focus their energies on studies instead of flattering the recruiters.

4. The concept of campus placements is there only in India. There is no such activity in foreign universities. They have ‘Job Fairs’ where students pitch to the concerned recruiters to prove their ability and get recruited. In this way, the elusive, misleading farce of corporate presentations can be avoided. The transparency from recruiters permeates in the process when the over-hyped, misleading and fake inputs on CVs are removed.

5. What is the logic behind the mammoth b-school fees? Paying the hiring managers to recruit summer interns from campus? The students have all the right to know every single detail of the breakup of their fees.

6. IIM Lucknow student hangs self in the hostel room. Read here.

Why are the future managers not able to manage their own lives? Why are they not able to withstand the academic rigour? Is the MBA curriculum so difficult that even the brightest brains in the country are knocked down by it? What is even sadder is this:

IIM Lucknow student body was hanging for over 2 days. Read here.

Are these the same students who are taught the importance of teamwork in their MBA curriculum?

When we are stressing the b-school students to such a level, are we facilitating a way for them to express themselves? Are we teaching them stress & emotions management along with business management? Soham’s death raises many questions indeed!

It is high time we restructure the Indian management education system before it breaks down completely!

 

With Love,

A Student