In India there are about 2000 business schools which churn out about one lakh management professionals every year. The number of business schools is three times greater when compared to the United States, which has an economy which is ten times larger than ours. The matter of concern is the poor quality of management graduates from Indian Business schools, making majority of them unemployable according to the industry. There are many reasons for the poor quality of the students, of which faculty shortage and poor quality of the faculty forms the important ones.

Increase in number of students and business schools

The number of management students in India has been increasing over the last decade with leading business schools opening up new campuses and new business schools being set up across the country like never before. This has made access to management education easy, but has severely affected the quality if management education in India.

No proportionate increase in number of teachers

Even though the number of business schools in India is increasing, the shortage of faculty is an area of huge concern for the management education sector in the country. The shortage of faculty in severe that India will fail to accomplish the goal set in the field of higher education. A report which was released by the central government in 2011 shows that the lack of supply of Ph. D.’s along with slow recruitment activities and lack of incentives to attract and develop talents has led to a condition where 40 per cent of the faculty positions remain unfilled. If the faculty student ratio is considered against the standard set by the government, the positions are vacant by 54 per cent. This is the case of the higher education sector as a whole; which included management education too.

In the case of Indian Institute of Management Ahmadabad, the number of students increased to 280 in 2009. In 1999, the number of students in the institute was 165. During the same period the increase in the number of faculty was nominal; from 83 to 90.

A criminal act

According to Chiranjib Sen from Azim Premji University Bangalore, the increase in number of higher education institutes without the increase in number of faculty is a criminal act. The point he stress is that if we cannot manage what we have, how can we manage even more?

The condition in Indian School of Business is not different. It started with 120 students and two faculty members in 2001 and now admits 570 students and 46 faculty members.

The shortage of faculty is even felt by the students from elite institutions. A participant from IIM Ahmadabad said that his batch consisted of 280 students and with such a large batch they hardly managed to finish case discussions towards the end of the course.

Poor interaction between students

Another problem with such larger batch sizes is that it leads to poor interaction between students and thus affects networking between students. Networking between students in elite business schools was once the driving force behind setting up of new companies by groups of students. Now such initiatives have decreased even in the top business schools.

Lack of infrastructure

Lack of proper infrastructure is another problem that many of the newly set up business schools face in the country. For instance the only Indian Institute of Management in Tamil Nadu that was set up a year back still operates out of the campus of NIT Trichy.

Declining quality of students

The increase in the number of students in the institutions will have a huge impact on the industry. The Indian industry has already expressed its concern over the deteriorating quality of the management graduates. They have even said that majority of Indian graduates are unemployable. It will also affect the setting up of new companies.

According to M J Xavier, Director of Indian Institute of Management Ranchi, the IIMs used to have closely connected groups of students. He added that such group of students came up new business ideas that resulted in start ups. But now this has started to decline.

No sufficient time for industry interaction

The industry says that curriculum of management education in India does not take into account the realities of the industry. They say that case studies forms an important part of management education at leading business schools, but is not producing desired outcomes due to the lack of interaction between participants, faculty members and business organizations.

According to K S Sundar Ram, an alumnus of Indian Institute of Management Ahmadabad, the advantage enjoyed by the students of IIMs in terms of employability is due to the close interaction between its faculty members and the industry. This helps the faculty members to understand the requirements of the industry and thus mould the students as per the requirements.

As the number of students increases without a proportionate increase in the number of faculty, the faculty members will not find sufficient time to interact with the industry and thus understand the trends in the industry. Few institutes such as ISB claims that they are considering the issue by placing weightage to research work that consists of publishing papers and industry contact during the annual appraisal of teachers. According to deputy dean at Indian Schools of Business, Deepak Chandra, the faculty time is split up into three for teaching, research and administrative matters.

Needs effort from the government too

The industry says that the government must put in effort to improve the situation and should consider changing the policy of inclusivity which is at the cost of quality of education. The increase in the number of leading management institutions should be substantiated with the improvement in infrastructure.

Another issue that prevents talents from entering academics is the low compensation packages. In most of the cases teachers earn much less than what their students earn in their first job; despite the vast experience they possess. So rather than joining the teaching profession, the talented individuals move to other professions.