All that is transparent may not serve a real objective, believes IIM Calcutta (Photo: Horia Varlan)

Until the last update, 25 of India’s business schools had committed to release detailed and audited placement statistics as per the Indian Placement Reporting Standards spearheaded by the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad. The standard lays down a process for recording and reporting job profile and compensation data drilled-down deep to fixed and variable salary components across sectors, functions and locations.

Prominent among schools that have bought into the idea are names like IIM Shillong, Xavier’s Institute of Management – Bhubhaneswar, SP Jain – Mumbai, Institute of Management Technology – Ghaziabad, TA Pai Management Institute – Manipal and more.

Last year, at a conference held by IIM Ahmedabad, the institute had proposed the first draft of the placement reporting standards in the presence of 33 b-schools including IIM Bangalore and some of the names above. Conspicuous by their absence were the Indian School of Business (ISB) – Hyderabad, IIM Calcutta and Xaviers Labour Relations Institute (XLRI) – Jamshedpur.

Last week, I spoke to Prof Amit Dhiman, IIM Calcutta’s placement chairperson to understand his viewpoint about why his school had refrained from following the IPRS or even participating in the discussions.

IIM Calcutta will not follow IPRS for the year 2012. Although the school’s administration agrees that the IPRS structure in itself is a good step, IIM Calcutta does not want to report salaries in the great detail as prescribed in the standards.

According to Prof Dhiman, the IIMs had started talking about a common placement reporting standard almost a year and a half ago. Setting standards for placement reports is indeed a good step. However, IIM Calcutta has taken a stand where we do not want to talk about the average and median salaries in such an explicit manner across sectors, Prof Dhiman told PaGaLGuY.

At present, IIM-C does not report too many details about salary structures. While it does mention the salary range that is offered to students across various sectors, it is mum on the maximum and minimum salaries offered. The institute believes that talking about the roles and careers that the students are graduating with is a good idea, but not the salary structures.

Prof Dhiman explained with an example. “If we consider investment banks, people may get a basic salary, lets say ‘x’, but the bonus itself may be between 0% and 500%. How does one project the correct salary figure or the average salaries offered to students in such a scenario?” Prof Dhiman said. According to the school, even if a few companies refuse to cooperate in sharing the exact figures, the exercise fails to meets its objective.

“If even a single company refrains from sharing its salary structure details, the average or median salary figures released would be incorrect. In such a scenario, not only would it be difficult for institutes to account salary numbers correctly, it would also present a false picture before society,” he says.

Talking about maximum and minimum salaries leads to complications, Prof Dhiman continues. In the earlier years, schools used to release figures about students getting maximum salaries in crores, which made salary reportage a point of contention in the first place.

Prof Diman says that the basic idea of placement report is to provide those who are thinking of a career in management the pulse of the placement scenario. “We give out all the information that is necessary to achieve this purpose,” Prof Dhiman said.

But take salaries out of the picture, and IIM-C has no problems with the IPRS. “Until we are convinced about the final objective that will be achieved by reporting salaries in the IIM-A format, we will follow our own placement report structure,” he concluded.

In the first draft of the placement report released by IIM Calcutta last year, the institute had only reported the range of salaries (as illustrated in this excerpt: “the Slot 0 finance firms compensation generally comprises of fixed component (INR 30-40 lakhs for Indian locations and INR 40-60 Lakhs for foreign locations)”). A month later, it had released a slightly more detailed report containing the average salary.