(Photo: psyberartist)

Free of the censoring knife of their PR committees, students of the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are having a ball anonymously posting what appears like an unbridled bitchfest about their b-schools on a Facebook page aptly titled IIM Confessions.

Imagine this: you are an IIM student who by choice or otherwise, is bound by an unspoken code of fraternal conduct under which you must always and only praise your school in public, and save the warts for internal consumption. If found to have spoken too frankly or objectively in public about your school, you would most likely be torched down by the disapproving glares of your batchmates for having hurt the schools “brand image”. Worse, if the eye of the Placement Committee falls upon your plain-speak, you might face terrible consequences, such as being sidelined in the placement process.

How do you vent then? You send your divulgence anonymously to IIM Confessions, which will publish it on their Facebook page as a cautionary note to overdazzled IIM applicants and in the process, “Enjoy confessing and demystifying the world of IIMs in specific and (of) MBA at large.”

What results is a fun semi-scandalous read about the dark side of IIM education, which can be shocking to the IIM-besotted though not so much for those who have previously befriended an IIM student sometime.

Sample this confession,

#50 I am an ex-placecomm member and I have a confession to make. There are loads of questions raised on whether the package quoted is real or fabricated. I take this opportunity to accept the fact that I myself I have reported an enhanced package in the placement report. Some companies which never visited the campus have been reported to recruit. Let me be frank here. This is something that all the IIMs and other B Schools are doing. The importance given the average package and the companies visiting the institute has made the whole MBA education a very competitive world. I had to do it since every other B School was doing it. If we dont do it we wont attract the best students. This in turn will mar the batch quality and the institute rankings in no time. It is a sad state of affairs. Even the corporate enjoys this kind of misreporting as they get co-branded with the IIMs name as a day zero/day one recruiter.

Average overestimation in reported salary is anywhere between 20% to 30%

When will we start giving importance to the culture of the institute, research work coming out of it, exchange programs, faculty support, and other things. Until we do that IIMs and others will keep misreporting their “”4 day-Placement Over”” gimmicks and corporate will keeping enjoying free publicity as top recruiters.

I am not going to name my institute for the sake of anonymity of the institute.

#placecomm #sadstateofaffairs

No wonder then that “Placecommers” are a rather derided lot (behind their backs) on IIM campuses.

#99 I am from the IIM in the land of idli, vada & filter coffee!

Majority of the PlaceCommers in my batch are females (read as 75%), a tactic employed by my college keeping corporate interactions! But, I hardly find any corporate houses visiting the campus though!

Or this,

#69 The only decision I consider to be the worst in my life is to get admission in IIM…Got to understand that if you could not do well in your board exams (though u got into top 1 %le of your board) when you were a kid busy in enjoying your childhood…Your whole journey from summers to finals will be miserable..Placements are the worst student run process in the campus though many other committees give a good competition..They are so hyped institutes..god save future CAT participants….

How do we know that the confessions are by real IIM students? Actually we dont for sure, and nor do the administrators of the Facebook page, who claim to be IIM students but wish to remain unidentified. I messaged them yesterday asking whether they ensured that the outpourings on the page were kosher, and this is what they had to say,

I would like to mention that there is no method by which we can track who is making the confessions. But, looking at who likes it and comments on it and the nature of confessions we can figure out whether its an IIM student or not who is making the confession. Still, no one can be certain and that is the beauty of it.

We have screened a lot of comments just on the first look because of the content or just because they were lame.

They want you to use your collective intelligence in calling out the bullshit from the page, while having some social media fun. Needless to say, the page has gone widely viral with over 2,300 likes within three days of its creation.

Although much of the confessions are harmless college grapevine, some are about the dating dumping scene on IIM campuses, which amused me for the particular choice of romantic vocabulary they all commonly employed.

#96 My Girl dumped me when she got few IIM calls..
and took me back when she was nt able to convert any..
I slept with her that night in process of consolin her fr nt makin into a IIM..
and dumped her the next morning..
Reeeveeengeeee!! ?

After IIM Confessions started, it barely took a day for versions of it to crop up, such as the NITIE Confessions and NMIMS Confessions, though both are rather tame as far as devilish advocacy is concerned, and are mostly full of cute college chatter or advice on having a sex life that actually involves another person, and isnt likely to engross anyone other than the schools own students. (Well, what do you know. Turns out theres a PaGaLGuY Confessions page too.)

A word about this paranoia surrounding “brand image” in Indian b-schools. India is probably the only country in the world where MBA programmes place minimal value on the “strength of intent” at the time of admissions, testing it as lip service at the fag end of the screening process, compared to b-schools in the rest of the world which force prospective applicants to articulate why they want to do an MBA, why from that specific school and why now using a highly competitive essay-writing process.

This intellectually bankrupt admissions process at the IIMs (and similar b-schools at the pre-experience end of the spectrum) results in an MBA class full of students who are there for no reason other than having the knowledge about the schools high reputation and brand name (many cannot even tell the difference between finance and consulting on the first day of college), and that reputation they hold dearly to their chests till the very end. Around it is built a machinery of manufactured reverence that seeks to show the IIMs as infallible using questionable and selectively transparent placement statistics and heavy controls on what kind of opinions their students can be seen to hold in public.

It ends up dehumanising the entire IIM system, most of all its students. In my nearly nine years of writing about business education, I have never once come across a student or a dean at an IIM who will dare sound like a real person, like this gentleman from Honduras whose schools culture allows him the freedom to be upfront that he cannot expect his school to hand him a job on a platter, or this lady in-charge of career services from a top Spanish school who has the earnesty to warn prospective students that it would be unrealistic for an Asian to expect a job in Europe in todays economy.

In contrast, the IIMs are always “immune to recession” which “continue to prove themselves as the campus of choice for top finance and consulting firms”, etc. Their students always “opt” for low-paying startup jobs because they are all suddenly bitten by the “entrepreneurial bug”, coincidentally during an economic crisis. Like, really?

As the IIMs increase batch sizes with the plummetting economy in the backdrop, I hear an increasing number of stories of IIM students who had to settle for the same job that they had before their MBA, or IIMs which have to tie-up with placement agencies and skill-assessment agencies as a method to access opportunities at the low-end of the job market, placement data about the lower halves of IIM batches that is getting increasingly murky, or students who are forced to opt-out of placements without being armed with solid networking or job-hunting skills (helpless posts on LinkedIn are testimony to this), and newer IIMs that try hard to sound like they have already beaten the older IIMs with the help of selectively shared data.

I expect this to get worse in the coming years as the “demand bubble” of management education in India bursts. The government has opened newer IIMs and increased batch sizes in the older ones based on the belief that there is an unmet demand for MBA degrees in India, a conclusion that it has reached based on the large number of people who sit for the CAT each year.

Do all 200,000 people appear for the CAT every year because they are convinced about management education after learning what it is all about, or because it takes as little as Rs 1,600 and three hours to try and get lucky on the CAT carousel and possibly access the IIM placement process two years later? Can such bogus reasons to appear for the CAT be termed as “demand” for the MBA degree?

By increasing batch sizes at the older IIMs and opening new IIMs at locations that are ridiculously inaccessible from business hubs, the government has outstripped its ability to fill up these b-schools with quality students that multinationals and large Indian companies would like to all hire at “the IIM MBA price”, and cannot already seek out from other second tier b-schools or even top undergraduate schools at lower salary packages, just as the IT and ITeS sectors learned to do while simultaneously making the oversupply of engineers irrelevant. In other words, the IIMs are admitting more clueless kids with high aptitude scores than the mid/high-end of the job market needs. On its part, the market is filling up the rest of the positions by hiring Indians who have attended global b-schools in Singapore, Europe and the US, or from top undergraduate colleges within India. The rest of the IIM students are having to settle for jobs at the lower-end of the market, shattering their expectations from the IIM brand.

To put it bluntly, just because the IIMs have more seats does not mean that getting one will boost your career. The IIMs might have just hit the law of diminishing returns on their seat-expansion spree, and you should think hard if you want to be a mere statistic that proves this law for future applicants.

In my opinion, the IIMs can fix this partially by making their admission processes less dependent on test scores, more dependent on well-thought out career intent and motivation that stands up to the toughest standards of questioning, and thus reducing the “false demand” from bogus applicants who would be repelled by a tougher admissions process that poses subjective problems before them, and whom coaching institutes cannot train while continuing to function as commodity businesses from inside basement rooms.

Those who find such an admission criterion revolting and unfair should probably reflect if getting an IIM admission is a sureshot ticket to success anymore, the way it used to be back in 2006. And whether their background makes it a worse investment than the alternative option of doing a more targeted MBA after a few years of quality work experience that improves their chances at the top multinational firms; the same firms that otherwise wouldnt even shortlist their CVs in a typical IIM placement process.

Is it any different at top b-schools across the world? No, and European and American schools are additionally plagued by economies that are growing a lot slower and becoming increasingly restrictive about their work permit policies. The difference is, that most of these schools are honest and relatively a lot more open about sounding off prospective applicants about possible risks.

It would be interesting to see how much longer the grand IIM PR machinery can hide away the warts resulting from these changes. Until then, do read “IIM Confessions” once in a while, because it is only here that you will witness IIM students behaving like real people. And like all humans, IIM students too often underreach their expectations, and you should know whether that is a risk worth taking for you.