The buzz inside b-schools this year is, that 2013 is the worst placement season Indias MBA programs have ever seen, worse than 2009 even.
We are trying to reason this years peculiarly startling results of the PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings survey in that context, and need your help further. Never before in the five years of the PaGaLGuY Rankings have the ranks of b-schools swung up or down in such measures. And we have been using the same methodology (read here), the same type of respondents and the same stringent security and data cleaning measures to arrive at the rankings.
Here is a sneak preview of the PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings 2013 results, the biggest rank gainers and losers in the Top 50. The bigger the box in the chart below, the bigger the b-schools rank gain or loss.
Despite the overzealous duplicate voting efforts of one “demographically unique” student from the fledgling Indian Institute of Management (IIM) at Kashipur — which we deleted in totality but did not outright disqualify the institiute as it was only one errant student — the school rises a whopping 35 ranks to 37 in this years rankings.
In fact, all of the new IIMs have risen substantially in respondent perceptions this year, indicating that people are warming up to their proposition after following them for two years. IIM Shillong breaks into the top 20, while IIM Ranchi just stops short. This despite the fact that all of them function out of makeshift campuses, run short of fulltime faculty and are yet to tout any notable differentiation despite having started without the baggage of the older IIMs legacy.
PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings 2013: B-schools in Top 50 that gained more than 4 ranks over the previous year.
And among b-schools that lost the most ranks in the perceptions of the more than 6,800 respondents, the Indian School of Business (ISB), now at Mohali apart from Hyderabad, stands out. ISB is no more in the Top 10 of our rankings and now stands at rank 12 compared to last years 5.
Equally unmissable is the plummeting rank of that other cult b-school of West India, Mudra Institute of Communications at Ahmedabad (MICA), which our respondents ranked at 28 this year. MICA however remains a strong brand among the fairer sex, ranked by them at 15 in the 2013 Womens Rankings.
Despite a higher number of respondents from the school than ever before, Symbiosis Institiute of International Business happens to be the Top 50 school that lost the most number of ranks — 13 points down — to be ranked at 43.
PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings 2013: B-schools in Top 50 that dropped 4 or more ranks over the previous year.
As you can see, rankings havent swung, but been literally hurled about this year in a way that our survey has never before reported. Apart from the observations above, here are two more,
– With the exception of TISS, all the top rank gainers are all government b-schools. From another point of view, TISS does not function too differently from a government-owned institution.
– With the exception of three, all b-schools that have lost ranks are private b-schools.
Baffling, eh? We would like to know your comments about,
1. Why did people downvote ISB Hyderabad/Mohali by such a margin?
2. What explains the drop in the ranking of schools such as MICA, IMI Delhi, SIIB Pune and TAPMI?
3. What has changed about the new IIMs that they have risen so much in peoples perceptions?.
Meanwhile, we will publish the complete results by next week.