Perform Or Perish

Look beyond the high performers and it is a do-or-die world for many business schools, where supply of seats is overtaking demand. For their students, the attraction of an MBA may be fading.

- E. Kumar Sharma

THE NUMBERS ARE disturbing. There are roughly 400,000 management seats available in India (Post-graduate Diploma in Management, or PGDM, and Master in Business Administration, or MBA) across over 3,000 institutes approved by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE). If unapproved institutes are included, the number could be around 4,000. Of those approved, only 55-60 per cent seats are getting filled.

So, it was with good reason that IIM-Ahmedabad director Errol D’Souza talked of how disruptions led by technological transformations were affecting management institutes, at a recent meeting in Hyderabad. “Business schools are responding to the change in different ways. Some are merging, others are going only for distance learning programmes... The schools that are at the bottom of the heap are finding it difficult to survive,” says D’Souza.

P. Maria Joseph Christie S.J., director of Loyola Institute of Business Administration (LIBA; 49 in