Commercialization of higher education

A few days ago, I received a phone call from a professor at a B-School where I teach as visiting faculty. He wished to meet with me to discuss what the B-School could do to build talent that is employable. We spoke at length about curriculum design and came to the conclusion that the curriculum in itself appeared to be well suited to building managerial talent. Why then are corporates getting disillusioned with the quality and abilities of people they are able to hire from B Schools in India today?

I suspect the answer is multi-faceted. On the one hand, students who get into B Schools somehow switch off once they get in. It is almost as if their goal was to get into B School for the label and not for the education. The B Schools are also to blame for the poor quality of their output. The quality and aptitude of the teachers they employ is often suspect. And apart from the government run institutions, there seems to be a tendency among B Schools to ensure that every student admitted graduates. There is a near zero failure rate. This is perhaps caused by commercial nature of the non-government schools. Everybody passes so that the institute can collect admission fees from the next batch on entrants.

I have been at the receiving end of this warped logic, when after a number of students failed to pass a tough examination for my course, the institute requested me to set another paper for the backlog examination. As per the institute's own published rules, the questions for the backlog paper had to be more difficult than the original, ostensibly to adjust for the extra time that the backlog students had to prepare for the exam and for the practice they had gotten at their first attempt. Predictably, most of the students who had failed the first time, failed again. At this point, the institute director assigned them some field work in lieu of another exam and everybody passed. Needless to say, most of these students were not among those who the best got job offers.

It is almost as if the education business in this country is answerable to Wall Street or Dalal Street. Rather than do what is right by the customer, their recruiters and their students, they do what would look good this quarter.