Yet Another MBA Cover Story

This time it is from Outlook. The rankings are not yet available online. However Outlook has tried to provide an explanation on the myths and facts of B-School rankings.

Related stories in the same issue

New-age schools – Looking beyond the IIM’s

Indian B-Schools should concentrate on all round personality development

There is an urgent need to do some quality control

Online MBA courses take shape in India

Taking the NGO route to serve the ‘real India’

Companies shun the ‘top B-Schools’

Very often there is this grudge that MBA grads from the top schools are highly demanding and they don’t prefer to join Consumber Durable makers (LG, Samsung), engineering & manufacturing firms (L&T, Reliance). This is a fact that is not just limited to the B-schools. Look at the engineering colleges. L&T, SRF and other engineering / manufacturing firms are feeling the pinch. Globally, there is a shift towards services and even though the traditional sectors pays on par (that's what I heard) with the IT firms, work culture and future prospects are drawing the grads towards the IT firms. Hence the engineering firms can’t keep crying anymore.

Recruiters—and even some insiders—are convinced that IIMs don’t prepare students adequately for the corporate world.

So, employers would rather source future managers from the less elite schools, as they can be trained and shaped. Asha Bhandarker of MDI, Gurgaon, undertook a study between 2000-04 to assess the value added by a B-school degree.

Things haven’t changed much since then."Students from top-rung B-schools come with a lot of attitudinal baggage. We firmly believe managerial skills can be picked by most people, only if they have the right attitude," says Y.V. Verma, senior vice-president, LG Electronics.

For, even the IIM graduates are quite choosy when it comes to selecting their prospective employees. A lot of them don’t want to join old-economy firms or those that aren’t seen to be ‘sexy’ enough. "It’s more a matter of mismatched strategic objectives between graduates and the companies."