Faculty needs of Indian business schools

Practising managers bring real-life problem-solving expertise to the table

In the 1960s and '70s, the government of India spent $10 million with help from the Ford Foundation to train 40 business faculty members at Harvard and other business schools. For many years, this investment gave India good returns in terms of high-quality business education at a handful of schools producing about 500 graduates per year. Today India has over 3,000 business schools graduating more than two lakh students, and yet there has been no comparable investment in faculty training; this has severely affected the average quality of business education.

One may wonder whether practising managers can impart quality business education without further training, obviating the need for investment. After all, they already are trained managers, and have the advantage of practical knowledge and skills. Students choose to leave their jobs to attend MBA classes; which would not have been the case if practical management skills was sufficient- in that case on-the-job training would beat classroom education.

At least a handful of top schools in India need faculty members who don't just convey the knowledge created by others, but also create new knowledge through their own research. For doing such research one has to train under other good researchers in top PhD programmes, which are found mostly in the US. The dilemma is that once a student completes a PhD in the US she is unwilling to take a job in another country. India's situation is unlike that of Korea or China that had so many PhD students in the US that not all could find jobs and some returned home.

Even if they don't return permanently to India, Indian-origin faculty in the US constitute a brains trust that can help Indian B-schools. For example, ISB was set up by the Indian-origin PhDs of the 1970s and '80s who are now top academics. However, the number of Indian students pursuing PhD in management abroad has decreased considerably since the 1990s, reducing the inflow into the brains trust. To help replenish the trust, at ISB we hire research associates aspiring to do a PhD, and help place them at good PhD programmes. Over the last few years ISB has sent about 75 students to top PhD programmes, primarily in the US. The number is small compared to India's needs, but in relative terms it is an increase of at least 50 per cent in the number of Indian students going to top business PhD programmes over those years.

Even with more students going abroad for PhD, and a handful of Indian schools increasing their output of quality PhDs, the number of trained faculty will be far less than needed to educate the two lakh business students graduating each year. So, a third part of the solution is to start bridge programmes to upgrade the existing faculty members and train practising managers to teach. These people cannot spend five years in a full-time PhD programme. The solution is to start a part-time Executive DBA programme that will give practising managers enough conceptual knowledge and pedagogical understanding to be good teachers. All these programmes are expensive. Companies that hire MBAs should step up to fund these programmes. Funding can be given to schools, or as scholarships to students to cover their stipends and tuition fees. Such funding will ultimately give companies a good return in terms of availability of a better pool of well-trained students to recruit from.

The author is Chair, Faculty Performance Management and Director, Fellow Programme in Management, Indian School of Business