Consider the problem of ranking 50 cricket players from best to worst. This motley bunch includes batsmen, bowlers, wicket-keepers and within bowlers too, there are fast bowlers, spinners, medium pace bowlers and what have you. The goal is to arrive at a ranking of cricketers that is nothing but the actual truth, with no room for ambiguity.
Of the several approaches you could take to solve this problem, in one you could start by measuring their vital statistics, age, accuracy of eyesight and hearing and more. Then, you could apply weightages to each of these parameters, use a statistical model and result with a list of indices, which when put in descending order will give you a ranking.
Will this be the rankings of the 'best' cricketers? I'm not so sure. At best, this will be a rankings of the physically fittest men, which will purport to predict that players that are fitter and physically better built will be good players. Clearly, a flawed assumption. As we've seen, height has nothing to do with being a better batsman (Sachin Tendulkar) and bad eyesight does not stop you from reaching the international team (Anil Kumble). Besides, rigging any of these attributes by using steroids and other dubious aids by sportsmen is a common occurence. Furthermore, it is questionable whether you can compare a bowler with a batsman. Such a ranking fails to tell you how good these cricketers are on the field.
Collecting data on a set of entities and weighting that data to arrive at a judgment is a fundamental error argued against by thinkers such as Malcolm Gladwell, who calls it the 'mismatch problem' in the context of hiring.
The act of ranking the best business schools based on objective data parameters such as faculty, infrastructure, placements, location and industry interface suffers from a similar fundamental error. A b-school's high or low score on these parameters has no relation with whether it will make good managers out of its students and get them good jobs. Furthermore, unlike height and weight, there is no way to quantify something as subjective as faculty and infrastructure. Parameters such as placements on the other hand are susceptible to faulty sampling, given how much b-schools rig these figures.
Choosing perception over objective data surveys as the basis of the PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings took us through reality checks such as this one. There is another predominantly used methodology we considered and rejected - one in which current MBA students are quizzed in detail about various aspects of their experience in their b-school. Considering how zealously overprotective MBA students tend to be about their choice of b-school in India - the 'my daddy best' mindset - there was little reason why such a survey would provide meaningful insights.
A closer examination of objective rankings reveals that such surveys parameterize the b-school experience mainly into:
- 1. Faculty
- 2. Placements
- 3. Infrastructure
- 4. Intellectual Capital
- 5. Student feedback
I'll take each of these parameters and try to explain why according to us it is not possible to clock any of this data accurately.
1. Faculty - good faculty is defined by objective surveys through several sub-parameters. Average number of years of teaching, credentials (number of PhDs, number of industry experience) or amount of consultancy and research assignments.
A reality check reveals this: except for at a handful of b-schools, the PhD degrees of professors at the vast majority of b-schools in India are from nondescript state-level universities scattered across the geography of India. A large number of PhDs are distance-education PhDs from the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU). Does number of PhDs in faculty really mean anything then?
Speaking to MBA students at reputed b-schools reveals an interesting insight: a professor's ability to make classroom teaching an enriching and valuable experience often have little to do with their background or credentials. According to an IIM Kozhikode alumnus, "In every term we had professors who had substandard communication skills and little knowledge of the subject. But if you looked at their CVs, you would expect to meet an extremely learned person."
Student to faculty ratio is perhaps a valid parameter, but only to the extent that it guarantees that a student will not find himself in a school with empty faculty cabins.
Except for a few b-schools in the creamy layer, there is little research of consequence happening in Indian bschools, rendering this sub-parameter useless. Measuring faculty quality via hard data parameters is thus not different from predicting cricketer performance through health tests - in the end, you will only find out the most 'qualified' faculty - which has little to do with how productive this faculty would be.
- 2. Placements - Cut-throat competition between b-schools has led to a situation where placements data shared by b-schools is suspect.
Distorting facts to project higher average salaries, inflating the CTC, averaging by combining international salaries with domestic ones, over-highlighting certain data to hide some other data are some of the methods in use. In such a scenario, comparing b-schools through hard placement data will amount to constructing a second lie over another.
Will b-schools agree to an audit over their placement process? I doubt it, because they don't need to. One could verify the authenticity of salaries reported at the IIMs by using the Right to Information Act, but private b-schools are not liable to any such accountability. Therefore, building a rankings over placement data is akin to constructing a bigger lie over another.
3. Infrastructure - in a Wi-Fi world with laptops coming to be a norm, infrastructure requirement for a b-school has reduced to a healthy built-up area, basic connectivity, academic resources and decent residential facilities. Other parameters such as the number of books in the library or number of electronic journals have questionable validity, since use of library is not a norm in majority of Indian b-schools. Furthermore, I have come across at least two occasions when two b-school ex-representatives confessed to me about having stocked their libraries with temporarily procured second hand books to mislead the research team of a major b-school rankings, should they conduct a surprise check. One of them said that these junk books stocked were in fact class XII books!
Moreover with the advent of Google, usage of libraries in Indian b-schools has become minimal. As paid content becomes obsolete across the world, students are heavily relying on more up to date information on the Internet for their projects and assignments. "The first time three-fourths of the batch stays in the library for more than half hour at a stretch is during placements, at the end of two years. Most people in the class have never used a library in their school or college and are able to sail through the two years without doing so. At most, the library is used as a quiet study area if your hostel is too noisy," says a second year student of a well-known b-school in New Delhi.
- 4. Intellectual Capital - Not conclusively quantifiable except in maybe 10 b-schools.
5. Student feedback - is always good in a country where students of the top 80 schools tend to be staunchly defensive of their choice of b-school.
By exploring the truth behind each of these parameters, we realized that by trying to solve these problems, one only keeps uncovering new ones. These parameters are so subjective that there is no way to sample them accurately. Stakeholders have argued with us that PaGaLGuY's staunchly neutral nature will help it arrive at an accurate 'best' b-school rankings if it followed an objective data based methodology, devoid of bias created by monetary lures. However, we think that the question 'Which are India's best b-schools and what are their ranks?' is a flawed question to start with. In order for a bunch of even 100 b-schools to be ranked on the basis of their quality, there have to be clear and demarcating factors that differentiate them. Such maturity is as yet missing in the Indian management education space. Apart from a dozen odd b-schools in the creamy layer, every other MBA institute is facing similar problems and functioning in similar constraints, leading to a pretty much similar educational product. Acute faculty shortage, lack of freedom of experimentation due to ancient AICTE norms, unaffordable real estate prices - it's the same story. There is arguably little difference in the quality of education in any b-school and the three others neighboring and on either side of it in any fairly conducted rankings. As you move to the bottom of the pyramid - b-schools in small town India are so closely similar to each other that attempting to rank them through objective data will be a farcical exercise.
Perhaps the closest an objective survey can get to the truth is according grades to schools, which a lot of surveys are already doing.
Do perception surveys provide accurate rankings of the 'best' b-schools? It is true that they don't. But they accurately tell you which schools are preferred the most, if the perception captures is that of a large mass of respondents who are fairly exposed to mainstream and social media to have a well-informed opinion about b-schools. And as one of the key questions that people wish to know while selecting a school (peer opinion), they do their job accurately, not dishonestly as objective data surveys purport to do - and in the process placing b-schools with dubious credentials in the top ranks.
According to us, the problem of ranking b-schools needs to be replenished with fresher and more relevant questions. Flexibility of technology and the presence of MBA stakeholders on the Internet and mobiles phones are leverages that need to be applied to solve more useful problems such as "What is each b-school good at?", "Who are India's top 100 professors?". Instead of a one-size-fits-all rankings, we need to provide people customized rankings that fit their profile and answer the question: "For my educational profile and career goal, which b-schools I should look at?" for every b-school aspirant.
The PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings solves an extremely important subset of these questions - "How do people in your region think about b-schools?", "Which schools do women prefer and why?", "How do people with more than 4 years of work experience rank b-schools?". Using perception and CommunityRank, we have been able to think through and accurately solve these questions using technology.
As for "Which are India's Best 100 b-schools", it is a stillborn question. Unless this is acknowledged as a real problem, the ecosystem of b-school rankings in India will not answer larger questions that really matter to stakeholders in the MBA value chain.