(* This is what glam-rock bands looked like)

It’s true. The growing importance of the private sector in India since the late 1990s revived the management education industry, as high-paying managerial jobs were aplenty and there were not enough trained folks to fill them. For the next decade, MBA began to be measured against (still does) how large a salary it could get you. That gave business schools a too easy way to market themselves. Like shampoo-makers talk of silky hair, like car-makers talk of great mileage, b-schools started selling themselves using salary figures. But just like shampoo-makers exaggerate the silkiness or car-makers overstate the mileage, b-schools too started inflating their figures to stay ahead of the competition. The graduates weren’t quite getting as much salary as the b-schools were claiming they were. However, the Media’s meticulousness in truly understanding b-school education was as much as Paris Hilton’s interest in the Pythagoras theorem. Newspapers and magazines fell for the hype created by b-schools’ placement reports without once questioning the validity of the data. Soon, public perception accorded ultimate infallibility to business schools (especially the ones considered as the best) and it became a taboo to question someone’s dream b-school.

Most schools, good or bad, have fudged their placement data one way or another. Two years ago, we wrote a column detailing some of the methods b-schools used to amplify their salary figures. About 4-5 years ago, the inflation of the average salary was straightforwardly blatant: observe your competitor b-school’s average salary and then artificially overshoot that number by a lakh or two. With many educational institutions coming under the Right to Information act, this stopped. But another trick replaced it – that of working in connivance with companies to have inflated raw data. We at PaGaLGuY have ourselves experienced it as a recruiter from one of the IIMs two years ago, where the placement representative urged us to include some deceptive components in the salary to push us up a slot (“add the travel component using Jet Airways ticket prices instead of Go Air. After hiring you can tell the student that your company policies have changed”). We eventually decided to remain in the same slot and not create unrealistic expectations in the student’s mind.

With companies themselves agreeing to inflate their salaries with empty ‘cost-to-company’ items, the average salary is now calculated using already-inflated raw numbers. As a result, it’s even tougher to point out the deception in placement reports.

The manipulation can sometimes be subtle. Here’s an example from recent times. In the last two months, one b-school sent us an interim placement report claiming that more than 30% of the class had already received PPOs and PPIs. To an untrained mind, it would seem as if one-third of the batch had already received jobs before the formal placement process. Look closely at the expanded form of PPO (Pre-placement offer) and PPI (pre-placement interview). We asked the b-school to give us a breakup of the exact number of PPOs and PPIs in the “30%” and it turned out that only 13% had PPOs. The remaining 17% had just been given PPIs, which are nothing but interviews and are not the same as a real job offer. Furthermore, all respectable b-schools get PPIs for some of their students every year but don’t report it, because there is nothing to report about a PPI. But by inflating that number to 30%, the b-school attempted a psychological sleight-of-hand which many would miss.

As an MBA aspirant, getting a realistic picture is not tough. It involves a little bit of socializing and thoughtful questioning. Now that there are so many avenues to know more about a b-school (reaching out to its students through your coaching institute or through social communities like Orkut, Facebook or Pagalguy), here’s what you can do:

1. Whenever a b-school tom-toms an average salary to you, ask for the monthly take-home salary for that average figure.
2. Ask for separate average salary figures for domestic and international salaries.
3. If you’re getting into MBA with a specific goal in mind (for example, you want to join the media industry in a business development role), ask specifically for a list of offers made in that domain in the last two years. If the b-school does not arrange those kinds of placements, it makes little sense for you to join it!
4. Ask for the lowest salary in the placements. In general, it takes just a couple of big offers to make a b-school’s average salary shoot up. The median salary (which lately many b-schools have started to show) is a better measure of what the b-school might end up paying.
5. Try to get in touch with students who have graduated with a lower than average salary. They are more likely to tell you the truth about that b-school’s placements than someone who has earned higher and is under the spell of adulation for the alma mater.
6. (Thanks to aster_da for this one) As a rule, a rough estimate of the actual in-hand salary figure = 66% of the salary quoted by a b-school.

Concept and Illustrations by chuck_gopal, graphics by Apurv. Deepak Gopalakrishnan aka Chuck aka’chuck_gopal is a PG Wodehouse and Iron Maiden freak, who learned how to make better presentations and contextually use words of superfluous character length during his stint at MICA. He’ works in Bombay, and in his spare time, apart from scaring aspirants with cartoons like these, attends gigs,’blogs and’tweets.