This is basically a response to some arguments recently voiced regarding global rankings of Indian B-Schools. This is not a detailed document for reference, but a rather response to a facebook post noticed by the Editor.

Mr. Abhijit Bhaduri, Chief People Officer of Wipro, made and observation recently. Hundreds of B-Schools in India churn out thousands of MBAs every year. We have 19 IIMs now. And yet… most of the Indian MBA programs don’t appear in global rankings?

Based on this observation, we have few responses and thoughts for deliberation.

Global rankings of Business Schools are heavily dependent on 2 factors, that is average research output in ISI indexed journals and the citation of those papers… This is often as high as 40-50%% of the total rankings, where Indian B-Schools heavily lack, due to higher much teaching load of the faculty. Other factors are like geographic diversity of students and faculty and placements.. In this global exposure and language skills will definitely help.
QS Ranking is the one thats mostly followed globally, and only 5 make it to the list, though none break into the top 100.

Indian rankings are very different where batch size (alumni network size), placements, and physical infra make the highest impact on good rankings, but sadly research output is missed out from students and faculty members… Due to this, the ecosystem thats created automatically, makes institutes more of training focused than on knowledge creation. Industry also needs to recognize quality research outputs from MBA grads, say IEEE papers, publications indexed in Scopus, etc….like it happens in developed economies, sadly doesn’t happen..
Mandates from government and the corporate ecosystem as a whole need to change if we significantly can scale up to the top 50… some companies value research (like MS, IBM, etc), else most companies prefer fire-fighters and operational compliance from the MBA grads. Sponsored research needs to pick up in Academics in collaboration with practice. This is one space we seriously lack in India, simply because publications apparently are not perceived as being important and operational issues are paid more importance.

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