When an MBA aspirant fails to make it to the top 30 Indian b-schools, her/his choices clutter around the next set of schools. But the problem comes how to make an appropriate choice?

A rough estimate of supply of B-schools in India as seen in some of the popular websites quote the figure as being close to 2,500. Their cumulative capacity for student intake is close to 2 lakhs from a total pool of 3.5 lakh applications through different entrances. An increasing number of B-schools are finding it hard to fill even 50% of their available capacities. Why is this trend persisting?

One possible reason for the trend is that the market for MBA education has moved from being an oligopoly to monopolistic. With the top students in the country, having more centres from the top brands in tier1, one can expect a cascading effect to flow down the hierarchy to tiers two, three, and so on. If the bottom 20% of the b schools is struggling to fill their seats, the mid category of the schools face the crisis to fill the seats with quality candidates.

Another possible reason is the demand-supply effect operating in the industry. In 2009-10, 60% of those who wrote CAT had work-ex. With the number of finishing courses after graduation, this has increased over a period of time. Furthermore, applicants with work-ex have a clear calculation on their ROI and opportunity cost.

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The problem lies with the freshers who don’t make it to the top tier b-schools and are left to choose from the remaining clutter. There are however, possibilities especially for the second tier b-schools to differentiate themselves in this monopolistically competitive market. Similarly, the customers of these b-schools can look at alternatives, other than ranking to make their choices meaningful.

From these customers perspective it is difficult to make choice purely based on placement situation or average salary package. Since, it’s a long-term investment, the above indicators, if not wrong, are poor representative of growth. If learning in the b-school is inadequate there is a possibility of stagnation in the income growth of the individuals.

The other important aspect to look at the position of the b-school is to find out the learning experience that can be delivered by the school. Though there are no easy ways to find these out, some indicators of these would be

– the number of faculty having PhD, offering of PhD program and research & consulting engagement of the faculty.

– Presence of centre for excellences in some specialized areas of research

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There are however, qualitative differences in these aspects too. However, if the choice is between some b-schools having presence of these indicators where some other do not have those, a prudent choice would be to look at a b-school having those for long-term ROI.

We’ve to understand that long-term investment on return from higher education is driven by relevant learning imparted to the students to take scientific decisions in changing environment and adapt oneself while moving up in the ladder of responsibility.

This article is written by Dr. Amalendu Jyotishi and Dr. Deepika M G who are faculty members at Amrita School of Business. Both, Dr. Amalendu

& Dr. Deepika,

hold a Ph. D. degree in Economics from ISEC, Bengaluru. The admissions team at Amrita School of Business will answer your queries here.

Note: This is a sponsored article and has NOT been written by the PaGaLGuY Editorial Team. It is intended from an informational perspective only and it is upto the readers to research and verify the claims and judgements in the article before reaching a conclusion.