Faculty crunch dogs B-Schools

Updated on: Friday, February 03, 2012

Indian business school classrooms have been growing in size over the past decade, spurred by rising demand for management professionals. Top institutes are opening new campuses and new B-schools are popping up everywhere. Management education is more accessible than ever before. Quality, however, has taken a backseat.

Around 2,500 institutes in India now churn out one lakh MBA graduates every year. The problem, say industry leaders, B-school professors and alumni, is that there are far too few teachers, even at premier institutions.

While the number of students at IIM’s flagship Ahmedabad campus rose sharply from 165 to 280 (in 1999-2009), faculty strength improved only marginally from 83 to 90.

Indian School Of Business, Hyderabad, started with 120 students and two teachers in 2001. Today it has 570 students and 46 faculty members—a better ratio than 10 years ago, yet not good enough for a top management institute, say experts. Harvard Business School has a student-teacher ratio of 7:1.

Students suffer decreasing interaction with teachers. Amit Mahajan (name changed), a member of IIM A’s class of 2010, says there were 280 students in his batch. “At the end of the course, we barely managed to cover case discussions,” he says.

“Larger batches can result in less student networking of the type that once helped old classmates set up new companies,” says IIM Ranchi director M J Xavier, an IIM-Calcutta alumnus.

Faculty crunch dogs B-Schools

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