Mindless regulation

AICTE covers up incompetence with blunt action

If there was ever a decision that proved that the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) isn’t doing its job properly, it is its blanket ban on part-time MBA courses. This means that the regulator for technical education will no longer approve such courses and those that are in operation will not be given permission to extend them once they are completed. In other words, by 2012, there will no longer be any AICTE-certified part-time MBA courses. AICTE officials say the rational for doing this is that several B-schools are misusing the facility, running other programmes under the guise of an MBA course and are even recruiting fresh graduates instead of those with work experience. This is undoubtedly true, as any recruiter will attest. But there are also many reputed institutes running decent part-time courses. Should they be penalised for other institutions’ sins? Surely AICTE should do some soul-searching about its own efficacy as a regulator and enforcer of technical education standards. Its solution to a problem of poor governance in part-time MBA courses is the equivalent of, say, the electricity regulator banning electricity transmission on grounds that T&D thefts are high. Using the same logic, there are many fly-by-night B-schools under AICTE’s bailiwick. Should it ban all B-schools?

To be sure, the ban on part-time is unlikely to be as disruptive as the rules for admissions, curricula and fees for the post graduate diploma in management (PGDM) that it notified in December, a matter that is now in court. Compared to the 200,000-odd seats available for full-time MBA courses from some 2,000 institutions, part-time MBA courses under AICTE’s ambit cover just 20,000 students in some 400 colleges. But as with the full-time PGDM, demand for the part-time MBA is growing robustly. Just as the PGDM is replacing the college graduation degree as the basic qualification for entry-level employment in a host of professions, the part-time MBA is increasingly being considered a tool for mid-career advancement by employers and employees alike, since it does not require a sabbatical. The popularity of the MBA degree can be seen from the fact that the US, the world’s largest economy, turns out just over 100,000 MBA students each year; in India, 300,000 youngsters appear for the full-time PGDM entrance tests. Part-time MBAs from reputed institutions also fulfil an economic gap because at Rs 1 lakh at the most, they are significantly cheaper than the full-time MBA, so it is easy to see why they are likely to grow in popularity.

Given the robust latent demand a blanket ban is unlikely to put an end to part-time MBAs. If anything, the lack of regulation is likely to encourage more and more unscrupulous businessmen to enter the field by offering such degrees with uncheckable affiliations and certifications from questionable “foreign” institutions, intensifying the very anomalies that AICTE hopes to check. Indeed, AICTE has not covered itself with glory with its indiscriminate approvals to all manner of B-schools and other technical educational institutions. Instead of trying to cover up for its mistakes with restrictive and heavy-handed regulations that are unlikely to enhance the quality of business management education in India, AICTE should focus on better, not more, regulation.