Be At Par With The Best Or Be Ready To Exit

How can B-Schools with limited resources enhance their quality? Careers360 talks to top B-Schools for their suggestions…

- Ashish Jha

The quality of a B-School is generally based on three factors - student quality, academic processes, research output and placement. But hardly 3-4% of the 3500-odd B-Schools in India do well on all these.

Infrastructure is important, but faculty is key Infrastructure, both physical and technological, remains the hygiene factor for basic academic requirements. Top academicians, however, suggest that this may help B-Schools only in the short term. Instead, they suggest B-Schools to strengthen faculty involvement as long-term investment for quality improvement. Prof. M H Bala Subrahmanya, Chairman, Department of Management Studies (DoMS), Indian Institute of Science advises average B-Schools to invest on high-quality faculty if they wish to move up the value chain. “It is important to realize the value of high quality faculty, apart from providing high quality physical infrastructure by Management Schools to their students,” he said.

Prof. MP Gupta, HoD, DMS-IIT Delhi, echoes similar sentiments when he says, “Invest in quality faculty and innovative courses & programs to bring out the best of them. Ultimately, your investments in these aspects will give you the platform to have higher resources and higher platforms.”

Another suggestion is on faculty development programmes and exchange programmes. “B-Schools should also keep upgrading faculty quality through incentivizing research, collaboration with faculty from other B-Schools of national importance, and if possible, providing international exposure,” says Prof. Kalyan K Guin, Professor & Dean, Vinod Gupta School of Management, IIT Kharagpur.

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