Interestingly, parents don't have to push very hard. Youngsters themselves are clamouring for a management degree. They clearly see B-schools as the best route to big bucks and a fast-track career. Result: a sudden mushrooming of business schools within the last decade. Today, there are over 700 schools offering MBA courses and the numbers are swelling. It's not just the increasing ranks, but the variety and regional spread of management institutes that are mind-boggling. Take for instance, Tamil Nadu, which has as many as 64 management institutions, though Maharashtra has the lead with over 140 schools. Overall, the regional spread is pretty balanced, if the number of schools set up after the 1990s boom are counted.

The larger the quantity, naturally, the greater the variant shades of quality of these schools. At one end of the spectrum you have world-class institutes and at the other end, there are the low-grade variety, degrees from which are not exactly passports to big-ticket jobs.

Can the MBA boom be sustained? Or will it go the way engineering education did? In the 1980s there were 52 engineering colleges in Karnataka, where the boom really began, and over a thousand engineering colleges across the country. The result: poor quality of graduates and unemployed engineers. Likewise, this rampant mushrooming of B-schools could possibly lead to a drop in the quality of Indian MBAs. How effective are the policy makers, beginning with the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), in ensuring high standards in B-school education in the country?

To find the answers to these and other questions, the All India Management Association (AIMA) commissioned the country's most comprehensive and largest-ever survey of business schools. Business India teamed up with AIMA to publish the survey and its findings. The survey was conducted across the country by Marketing Development Research Associates (MDRA), a Delhi-based research agency, and covered almost the entire spectrum of business schools. It threw up a host of interesting findings, some that were blatantly shocking, but for the best part reassuring.

The B-school boom, the survey finds, is quite sustainable over at least the next few years. The players, by and large -- in the top end and the middle of the spectrum -- are serious about the business of education. And the overall trend shows no major deviation from the experience of the West, where too quality can vary quite a bit. Wharton, Kellogg, Harvard, Stanford, INSEAD, IMEDE, among others, are in the top league and a wide chasm separates them from the rest. In India those at the bottom of the rung are a cause for concern.

The AIMA-Business India survey of B-schools is based on the objective scores each of the institutes received (see Methodology pg 93). An unprecedented 370 schools participated in the survey. The actual number used for the survey was 310, after eliminating schools which gave inadequate, sketchy or unreliable information. Also for the first time, each school covered under the survey was visited by a staff member of MDRA for purposes of validation.

The previous best response from the same pool of schools was obtained by the Government of India sub-committee on quality of management education in March this year, which covered 109 institutes.

In the top 10 category, the ranking was quite predictable, with just one interesting dark horse: Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneshwar, made it to the top. Also, the order in which the schools stacked up was interesting. While the traditional B-school leviathan IIM Ahmedabad retained its first slot, the second slot went to a surprising contender, IIM Lucknow, which was barely 14 points below its peer, a massive achievement for a relative newcomer into the traditional B-school line-up.The focus is clearly on XIMB Bhubaneshwar, which has joined its cousin XLRI Jamshedpur at the 10th place in the line-up. For S.L. Arvind Pande, SAIL chairman, this should come as good news, as he also heads the institute as its chairman. XIMB has done extremely well for itself in terms of placements, facilities to augment learning and in terms of infrastructure.

There's little drama with the top 10, as it features the expected names. But moving a rung lower, to the next 20 A+ category schools and the 44 A category schools, we get an extremely encouraging picture that endorses the belief that the MBA boom will be sustained in the long run. It also reveals that the existing model of leaning heavily on government grants is no longer valid. Quite a few B-schools are self-sustaining, willing to experiment, provide a world-class learning ambience, are totally ready to support the faculty and students and generally keep the highland spirit of an average MBA student fully alive.

THE LURE OF BIG SALARIES

The MBA illusion is based on the dreamy salaries   the top business school graduates are fetching in the market. At starting packages of between Rs 4 lakh and Rs7 lakh (see page 84), they are better paid than the CEOs of most medium and even some large-sized companies. That is what the cream gets. What about the rest? The sharp differentials are quite telling. Consider this, all ye dewy-eyed hopefuls (and their parents): our survey shows that 67 per cent of MBA students don't get campus placements. The MBA tag may, hopefully, get them a job eventually. But even among those who do get jobs on campus, as many as 45 per cent got less than Rs10,000 per month as starting salary. Did someone say MBA means big 'big bucks'?

FACULTY SHORTAGE IS SERIOUS

In the education business, faculty is crucial. Considering the way the MBA schools are currently structured, there is hardly any incentive for the best brains to trade a highly-lucrative career in industry with its pay and perks in return for a campus career which, apart from paying less, may have locational disadvantages. The smarter solution is to combine a career in industry along with teaching. This seems to have become a rage, especially among the alumni of major B-schools. "It helps in two ways. One is to constantly brush up on the subject with current embellishments and secondly to establish a close rapport with the prospective source of future managers," says D.S. Govindrajan, director, sales & marketing, Cyberstar Loral.

This trend has been reinforced even in the much-hyped Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyerabad model, which plans on getting the best brains from industry as faculty. Dr S.B. Majumdar, founder director of the Symbiosis group of educational institutions, thinks it is quite in the scheme of things. "We have a pool of over 100 visiting faculty of high calibre, drawn from industry, who teach in our MBA institutions," he says.

NO GROWTH IN INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL

Is the intellectual capital of our B-schools growing? Far from it. The survey shows a highly disturbing trend across the spectrum. Our study found that. As many as 70 per cent of the institutes did not have a single member of the faculty who had published a research paper. As to books, there is hardly any institute outside the top 50 category where a faculty member has authored any work.

Even the luxury of having adequate faculty isn't available in many cases. In 54 per cent of the institutes surveyed, there were less than seven faculty, while the AICTE norm is itself a minimum of seven permanent faculty. Most institutes claim that they get by with high quality visiting faculty who are on permanent call. Visiting faculty charge Rs500 to Rs1,000 per hour for the best. For the others, it could be as low as 160 per hour.

Barring a couple, none of the 400 or more students surveyed in the country's elite B-school class rooms wanted to take up teaching. "Maybe after a few years of experience; maybe as a visiting faculty for a few sessions; maybe as a guest lecturer," was the refrain.

LOW FACULTY STUDENT RATIO

This is also low. While the international norm is 12:1, meaning one faculty for every 12 students, here the ratio is one faculty for every 30 students. In the case of institutes figuring amongst the top 50, the ratio was as high as 60:1. This doesn't take into account the burden on the faculty on account of the part-time MBAs, distance learning and executive development programmes. At the lower end of the spectrum, the faculty are either absent, under-qualified, certainly underpaid and massively exploited, all factors that are against their taking on any or all of the courses that catch the fancy of the governing board members.