With only about 1750 approved MBA colleges in the lists of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) and the list of non-approved almost double that figure, the challenges and scope of management education is immense. The chairman of the Board of Management Studies, an advisory body of experts at AICTE, professor N Sambandam talks to Pagalguy about some of the recent council discussions. Professor Sambandam is a senior faculty and dean at the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Mumbai.

What was the outcome of the last council meeting held in October?

The council has taken the decision that from the coming academic year, the private MBA colleges will have to stick to a schedule to start and end their admission process. This decision was taken in view of the numerous complaints that the AICTE received through out the last academic year from students and institutes.

The complaints that we have received, include student v/s institutes and institute v/s institute complaints. There are institutes that gave out admissions on the basis of previous year CAT or other entrance test scores. There were others that gave provisional admission to students even before the test scores were declared and made the students pay the fee in lump some, in the hope to block as many students as possible. Lured with a ready admission, students get into the trap and after the results, if want to move to a better college, they have to let go of the fee already paid.

The time frame will soon be notified to the institutes and the students. This time frame will have the availability of all the acceptable entrance test scores so a uniformity in the admission process can be maintained and the students are not exploited.

How does AICTE react to the dip in the number of candidates taking the Common Admission Test (CAT) this year?

The matter was discussed in the last meeting. The dipping number of students is a greater concern when seen in context of the number of institutes offering a management course is growing at 10 per cent every year. Though there is no formal notification given by AICTE, but the societies and trusts that approach AICTE requesting approvals should actually sit back and evaluate the scope of starting a business school. The quality of students and education has to convert into jobs, which becomes a scale that students measure against. It is no good if a society starts a management school the first year, two years down the line cannot place the students and the third year shuts operation.

Besides getting quality students, are there any other challenges that the institutes are facing right now?

Creating and retaining faculty has become the greatest challenge. This issue has been discussed for a lot of years but we are still far far away. My personal experience also says that there is a great need of scholars and people opting for academia. People enrolling for the PhD, start of as promising resource persons and prospective faculty members, but are often absorbed by the industry in their second or the third year only. There are institutes that are offering Faculty Development Programmes (FDPs) but they are for existing faculty.

A pleasant surprise that I have witnessed is the return of graduates and alumni from the industry, looks to start out in academia. If explored, they can be an answer to the faculty crunch that we have.

How does AICTE view institutes that are seeking affiliation with foreign universities?

There are very stringent rules that an institute has to follow if they want to launch an institute with foreign affiliation. After AICTE tightened the whip on one of the defaulters, the institutes have started seeking approval from their respective state governments. If a state government has given approval to such an institute and also a status of state university, it goes beyond the jurisdiction of AICTE. There are some states where such institutes are mushrooming and the students should be careful while making their choices.

Are there any issues that AICTE is working on?

In the last academic year there have been over 300 institutes that have demanded that the distinction between the Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) and Masters in Business Administration (MBA) or Masters in Management Studies (MMS) should be removed or needs to be made more clear. There is an ambiguity right now and there are several applications that we receive every year that ask if a PGDM from an institute can be considered equivalent to a MBA or not. Such enquiries also come up where management graduates are being recruited in government departments. Hopefully, the confusion will be sorted out soon.