Improved rankings through focused efforts: B-schools

In 2013, when Ashish Nanda took over as the director at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A), one of his foremost wishes, he said, was for the institute to connect well internationally, going beyond student exchange programmes.

Looking at its performance in the Financial Times (FT) Global MBA Ranking, 2016 of top full-time global MBA programmes, IIM-A may well have begun connecting well internationally. The Indian B-school’s post graduate programme for executives (PGPX) this year has emerged top ranked among Indian B-schools featuring in the FT Global MBA Ranking 2016, improving its rank from 26 last year to 24 this year. Notably, IIM-A was ranked first globally for career progress of its one-year full-time residential programme alumni, moving up from second rank in the FT Global MBA Ranking 2015 and beating marquee names such as Harvard Business School and Insead among others.

Ashish Nanda, director of IIM-A said, “Rankings are useful for benchmarking how we are doing compared to peer institutions. We are pleased that the institute continues to be highly regarded for the quality of education and career opportunities it provides to its students. We will endeavour to maintain excellence in the educational experience.” The B-school also improved on several aspects of campus diversity, such as percentage of female faculty, female students and international students. At IIM-A, both percentage of female faculty and female students were reported at 19 per cent, while percentage of international students stood at 4 per cent.

While the PGPX requires prior work experience, the share of students with work experience has been climbing at IIM-A, even for the two-year post graduate programme in management (PGP). The 2014-16 batch of PGP had 63.2 per cent of the students with work experience, which went up to 64.65 per cent for the 2015-17 batch. IIM-A plans to increase it to 80-85 per cent of its students by 2020-21.

One of the steps it has recently taken is a scheme during admissions, where selected candidates with less than three years of prior work experience are assured seats through deferred admissions. The candidates are, instead, encouraged to get work experience before coming back to join. The institute has been making efforts to increase diversity on its campus too. For instance, according to Nanda, specific steps such as introduction of supernumerary seats for international students and revisions to its admissions process have been taken in order to achieve increased campus diversity.

Having debuted in 2011 at 11th position in the FT Global MBA Ranking, IIM-A had maintained its position in 2012 before falling to 26 and later 30 in 2013 and 2014, respectively. However, the premier B-school has since then gone on to improve on its position to 26th place in 2015 and now 24th position this year.

The Indian School of Business (ISB), the only private school from India to figure in the rankings, has bagged the 29th position this year, up four places from 2015.

While the 2016 rankings are based on the opinions of alumni belonging to 2012 batch and their performance in the last three years, one of the notable contributors to ISB moving four levels up in the rankings was its performance on the research front. ISB was the only Indian business school that figured in the University of Texas-Dallas (UT-Dallas) research rankings released recently.

This is also reflected in FT’s ranking when it comes to research as a parameter.

A big differentiator has been the tenure track system followed by ISB with regard to the performance of its faculty in research work. Under this system, ISB faculty members are required to publish their research papers in top international publications with peer review in a span of six-seven years. Those who fail to publish their papers will have to move out of the institute.

Having a research paper published in a top international journal is a big accomplishment for a faculty member as the acceptance rate is typically just 2 per cent. Since its inception, the ISB faculty have contributed more than 150 articles to reputed international journals, according to the institute.

The Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, which was ranked 62, rising 20 positions from its place in the 2015 list, also undertook several initiatives such as international exposure for the students through collaboration with universities/institutions across the world, providing career guidance to  students, introducing several new elective courses based on feedback from recruiters and current needs of industry, to improve its position.

"Special effort was made to improve the diversity of the class in terms of students’ background, experience and gender," said U Dinesh Kumar, chairperson, Executive Post Graduate Programme in Management (EPGP).

"The EPGP is relatively a new course for IIMB and this will help us attract talented students into the programme. We already saw a significant jump in the number of applicants this year," Kumar added.