India's best B-schools: How the country's MBA education is changing, giving students more options

Management education in India has evolved and how—starting off as a post-graduate diploma in the 1960s and ’70s, to getting a boost from the country’s economic liberalisation in the 1990s, to IIMs’ MBA degrees coming into play in 2017, to withstanding the Covid-19 disruption of the 2020s, to the current post-Covid-19 hybrid work paradigm that has shaken up the management education ‘industry’. Today, an MBA is not necessarily only a two-year programme. Why, you could even do it fully online, if you so wish, albeit its merits are yet debatable.

With Covid-19 awakening B-schools to the benefits of flexibility in course delivery, and edtech firms joining the management bandwagon, the already diverse universe of management courses and formats has further expanded. Today, a student can choose from a one-year MBA (a career pivot tool for a working professional); an executive MBA (shorter programmes designed for experienced professionals to move into leadership roles); a host of online certifications from edtech firms and, of course, the good old full-time two-year MBA. And these courses are being delivered in different ways—on-campus, hybrid, and even fully online.

And so it is that in this 24th edition of the Business Today Best B-schools ranking, done in partnership with MDRA since 2013, BT has introduced three new categories—India’s best one-year MBA programmes, best executive MBA programmes, and the best edtech platforms offering management programmes—in addition to the traditional ranking of two-year MBA courses. (See the rankings starting page 126.) While the traditional ranking is based purely on objective data collected from the B-schools, the other rankings are based on a combination of secondary data plus a perception survey of different stakeholders (see methodology on page 124).

While change is famously the only constant, the pace of change has accelerated in recent times, especially in advanced economies, where questions are being raised about the relevance of two-year management programmes for both students and employers. “The two-year MBA in the US is under severe financial stress,” says SPJIMR Dean Varun Nagaraj. Enrolments to schools outside the elite league of, say, Harvard till Carnegie Mellon, are under pressure because their value proposition is not that great beyond a certain ranking. That’s why specialised one-year masters are all the rage now there, says Nagaraj. “The new money-spinner for all US business schools is the variety of one-year programmes either in data analytics or business intelligence or supply chain.” This was already the case in Europe, says IIM Bangalore (IIMB) Director Rishikesha T. Krishnan, where they don’t have too many one-year MBA courses in general management. “They recognise that in one year, there is only about so much you can do,” he says.

But India is different. Here, the two-year MBA serves more as a “mind-expanding finishing school” in the absence of a broad-based liberal arts approach to education, says Nagaraj. “MBAs here have to almost act as the fourth and fifth year of school or college. We should look at it differently [here] than in the US because what precedes the MBA in India is very different.” Plus, what serves the two-year MBA’s case well in India is its popularity among newcomers to the workforce as a path to well-paying jobs. For instance, XLRI Jamshedpur Director Fr S. George says the institute’s XAT 2023 entrance exam received more applications for the two-year programmes than the one-year ones. “The competition for seats for the one-year programmes is comparatively lower than the two-year programmes. Indian MNCs are interested in hiring young professionals—rather than experienced candidates—whom they can groom and mould as per their requirements,” he says.

IIM Calcutta (IIMC) Director Uttam Kumar Sarkar says a high percentage of graduates continue to be hired for general management skills. “It’s not either/or. We need both the full-time MBA as well as specialised programmes of shorter duration… I can use AI and ML in a certain sector, say, manufacturing. But I need to know a little bit of manufacturing as well. So, I need marketing, finance, organisational behaviour and all these core concepts to be put in perspective.” The consensus among India’s top MBA institutes is that the two-year courses will persist at least for the next decade. But the opportunity cost involved in staying away from the workforce for two years in a fast-changing business world for professionals with work experience is fuelling the interest for one-year programmes. “Experienced professionals are the driving force behind the rapid adoption of the one-year MBA programme in India,” says Fr George.

Institutes such as Indian School of Business (ISB), IIMs A-B-C, XLRI, and SPJIMR, among others, have started the one-year format, reflecting the industry’s demand for practical experience combined with specialised business education. ISB, the pioneer of the one-year format in India, sees work experience as important for MBAs. “It leads to better learning outcomes because of students’ ability to connect what is taught in the classroom with what they had experienced previously. They get better context and learning from the lectures because of this relatability,” says Ramabhadran Thirumalai, Deputy Dean–Academic Programmes, ISB.

Not surprisingly, experts predict greater pull for the one-year format in times to come. “I won’t be surprised in the long run if things shift more and more to a one-year programme, particularly for people with experience,” says IIMB’s Krishnan.

Client expectations from the consulting industry are evolving, which reflects in the hiring profiles, says Priya Ramdev, Director of People Function at McKinsey & Company. “While the generalist consulting aptitude remains integral to client needs, industry/functional knowledge and expertise is also becoming critical for certain roles. Any programme that can meet these requirements will continue to remain relevant for the industry,” she says.

While the pandemic’s soothsayers predicted that management education would go fully online, the verdict three years since is that a fully online programme cannot offer the whole breadth of experiences that an on-campus programme can—peer-to-peer learning and networking being chief among them. And so, with both formats likely to continue, many institutes have retained some degree of online learning as they plug the crucial gaps of reach, affordability and scale in traditional methods.

S-BASED ONLINE learning platform Coursera says it now has 17 Indian university partners, including top B-schools such as IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA) and IIMC. Three years ago, it had just two. For instance, SPJIMR’s online two-year PGDM on Coursera costs a quarter of what the on-campus programme does, says Raghav Gupta, MD, India and APAC, Coursera. The course combines synchronous and asynchronous courses (online courses; the former runs in real time, the latter can be followed using recorded videos) with on-campus experiences. “There is certainly demand for hybrid learning like this where you can learn when you want without losing the on-campus experience,” he says, adding that IIMA saw more than 100,000 online enrolments in its open courses on the platform within six weeks. In contrast, the limited seats available means that only a tiny fraction of the 200,000 CAT takers make it to India’s top schools.

As India and its corporate landscape are set to occupy the pride of place in the world economy over the next few decades, the face of management education is also changing with a multitude of options for students. As IIMB’s Krishnan puts it: “There’s this whole spectrum [of programmes]. And there are all these options. We will need to configure them in various ways to meet the needs of the target group.” That can only be good news for aspiring managers and CEOs.

Over the following pages, read how the Top 5 emerged winners.

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