Management Education at Tier 2 Business Schools in India: Challenges and Scope

Introduction

Indian economy is marching towards success and growth and is creating ample amount of opportunities in various fields. Creating and maintaining this success, managers are multi-talented and multi skilled managers are required. Management education is a much sought-after field for the students who want to peruse management studies specially after their graduation. Well paid jobs and greater opportunities are the major puller for students in this field.

India on the other hand has huge reservoir of people passing out with management degree. As the management institutes are capable enough to meet the demand of the market, the need at present is to improve and maintain the quality of managers. All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) have observe that other than the Tier 1 institutions (Tier 1: Old IIMs and other repute business schools which comes in top 25 ranking of worlds repute agency), there is a shortage of practical exposure of faculty in management institutions who are not able to conduct a decent quality research. Also, a large number of management institutions have very poor framework of assessing the students and this is deteriorating their quality output. This study is focusing on the status of management institutions other than Tier 1, authors of the study have named them Tier 2 Business Schools (T2BS), T2BS are those institutions which comes under good raking of NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework) probably under 100 and they are also awarded by NAAC (National Assessment and Accreditation Council) as A+, A or B+ grades.

In country like India where student’s population is too large and Tier 1 instructions cannot serve this large chunk, here T2BS can play a vital role in preparing of skill workforce as per need of industry. Liberalization in 1991 has also created the scope for expansion of business operations which leads the demand for professionals to handle their operations. This change fascinated the students to have a professional degree to grab the market opportunity, and management degree was one of them. There onwards management education had been perceived as a passport of getting high perks jobs and management educational institute acted as a catalyst for creation of employable management professionals. India is having considerable youth population; In fact, the proportion of student population in India is higher than the total population of many countries in the world. With such intense population and an outspread institutional network, the higher education system of India ranks second after China. (Tilak 2020). Students’ orientation towards the management education have seen changes in positive directions especially in the last few years and this change has led to increasing enrolments in management education programs (Arbaugh 2014 & Dyllick, 2015).

Data of All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) reveals interesting facts regarding the scenario of management education in India (Figure: 1); it shows that from 2013 -14 to 2020-21, enrolments in AICTE approved management institutions has always less than their intake, some of the institutions are closing down due to the less enrolments, this is not a good signal for the future of T2BS in India.

Figure 1.

Status of management institutions (Intake v/s Enrolment)