At India’s Top Business School, The Jobs Are Plentiful & The Students Satisfied

The Indian School of Business in Hyderabad

Incoming students are divided into sections of 70 each, and then go through eight six-week terms, one after the other. The first week of the 51-week program is devoted to orientation. Another week is given over to projects. Otherwise, the first three terms are made up of the core curriculum. The fourth is a mix of core and a few electives. And the remaining half is for elective courses and for 50 to 60 students a year an exchange program at one of 35 other business schools.

 A HIGHLY COMPETITIVE CULTURE IS PART OF THE SCHOOL

Unlike most U.S. or European MBA programs, ISB is also one of the most highly competitive cultures of any business school in the world. After all, a typical Indian student could take as many as 22 board and college entrance exams by the time they enter college. The competition to gain one of the limited slots in the country’s system of higher education is cutthroat. Those cultural norms spill into the classrooms at ISB where a grading curve tends to stoke the competition.

And yet, the school is currently piloting new technology that will keep every student on his or her toes even more. Dubbed “The Engaged Classroom,” professors here are beginning to use computer technology to ask every student in a class questions that they must answer in one sentence within two minutes on a handheld device or laptop. Their answers immediately show up on a screen for everyone in the class to see and judge. “Instead of a typical case study class, where only 15 to 20 people get to speak, here everyone is engaged all the time,” says Pereira. “The lazy guys don’t like it. The bright guys who do the work love it.”

Students generally praise the peer-to-peer learning in classes, enjoy the lack of hierarchy at the school, and say that despite the paucity of international students they are surprised by the diversity of backgrounds among classmates. “In the first week it seems like everyone is an Indian and there’s not much diversity here,” says Sruti K.V., a 25-year-old female student who plans to start a for-profit organization with a social mission when she graduates. “But then you find that the students are from different backgrounds and bring a lot of passion to the classroom.”

HOPES TO RAISE MORE THAN $100 MILLION FOR THE SCHOOL OVER THE NEXT FIVE YEARS

Many of the students—taught before in fairly rigid Indian classrooms—also speak highly of the quality of the teaching. Though some of the junior faculty struggle through their courses, the visiting professors are often such stars that they are among the best teaching faculty in the world. “I was dazzled by the faculty in my first two weeks at ISB,” says Vikram Jain, 25. “My undergraduate studies were more mechanical with no real design to make learning happen in the classroom. The sheer sense of knowledge they bring to their subjects is amazing.”

And Dean Rangneskar get high marks from students for bring approachable and supportive. Hoda Golshani, a 28-year-old former commodities trader from Iran, is forming an art consultancy in India upon graduation. “I went to see the dean and asked for the names of five possible clients,” she says. The dean turned over five contacts for Golshani’s new business.

Dean Rangneskar says the most common misperceptions he has to fight is that “india is the boondocks” and that “we are very financially strapped.” After spending $100 million to build its campus, the school has no endowment. “The money we received is already used up,” says Rangneskar. “We don’t sit on a cushion of cash.” The upshot: The dean has little discretionary cash available to pay for something out of the ordinary, and ISB only has $1.5 million in annual scholarship money which it doles out in $15,000 to $20,000 grants to between 10% and 15% of its students. The program tuition, at $45,000, includes the cost of housing as well as a quirky 12.4% government service tax on tuition fees collected by the state.

Still, he insists that the school’s board—composed of many of India’s leading businesspeople—is extremely generous. “I have a board which is in love with the school. The day I tell them we need money, they always support us. But people want to see cash in the kitty.” Rangneskar says that the school’s executive education offerings bring in $15 million in revenue a year, an area he intends to grow. He also hopes to raise $100 million for the school over the next five years.

He’ll use the money to recruit more senior faculty to the school, hoping to increase the size of the permanent faculty to 80 or 85 from 49 currently, and to strengthen the school’s expertise in such key disciplines as strategy, finance and marketing. “We have young faculty and they are like oak trees,” says Rangneskar. “They don’t grow overnight. I want to attract 10 to 12 senior faculty over the next ten years to boost our research. My target is Wharton. I want to be where Wharton or Stanford is in academic research. That’s the best of the best.”

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