In 2009, PaGaLGuY started ranking India’s business schools using a methodology that harnessed the best of the possibilities that the Internet had to offer at that time.
This year, 2014, will be the final year that we will rank business schools. We are officially announcing a shutdown of the PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings in their current form starting 2015.
Click here for PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings – The Final Edition
Why we are shutting down the rankings
Business schooling boomed in India in the 2000s like it did nowhere else, riding on the back of the country’s 8%+ economic growth. But in this decade, it is getting spring-cleaned. Growth is down to 4.8% (Q2, 2013-14) and for about three to four years now, there haven’t been enough things to be managed for companies to maintain their pre-2008 MBA hiring growth rates.
In response, b-schools are developing cold feet. An increasing number of them are shutting down each year. Fewer people are signing up to take management entrance tests, and even fewer seriously so (more than 55% could not even score zero marks in CAT 2013). CAT coaching institutes have drastically scaled down and are increasingly becoming centers for bank officer and government services exam coaching.
The MBA degree is but a layer of abstraction between corporate job opportunities and their seekers. Depleted entry-level opportunities within the country have weakened the motivation to spend two years learning business in India at the prevalent fee brackets. There are hints which suggest growing preference for studying business abroad or at one-year Indian MBA programs after gaining 4-5 years of work experience.
How has this affected the demand for information on Indian MBA programs? In the last two to three years, we have observed conversations between MBA applicants turn more transactional rather than discussion-based. Compared to the long-drawn and passionate debates and comparisons that we previously used to see on PaGaLGuY and elsewhere on the Internet, there is a shift towards seeking piecemeal information about MBA programs, processing it for individual context and moving on.
It is not as if the increased web/social media presence of b-schools has improved the quality of available information for these discussions to stop. If anything, it has only become more dubious in the hands of b-school public relations or marketing departments who often use it to posture what they qualitatively are not, without check, or post conflicting information to applicants at different times of the year to maximise admissions throughput while benefiting from the plausible deniability that comes from the “unofficial” nature of social media, etc.
What has changed however is that in this current environment of economic slowdown, Indian MBA programs aren’t engrossing enough for people to care about as much as earlier.
This makes it a good time to rethink business school rankings. There are two problems we see with all b-school rankings as they are today, including ours.
Rankings have been helping applicants fix a range of b-schools they would like to target based on the prevalent environment of corporate job opportunities. In a booming economy with jobs aplenty, an applicant initially targeting schools ranked say, 10-15 may still settle for the school ranked 25 or even 30, hoping to reverse the loss later in a flourishing job market. In more cautious times however, the same applicant would rather try his chances again in another year than settle for much lower than his initial shortlist. Rankings then lose importance and become at best a tool to reconfirm existing beliefs rather than being a source of knowledge about a wider range of choices.
Secondly, if you think about it, rankings are a rather primitive proxy for the human need for “lists”. From time immemorial, man has used lists as a cognitive hack for organising unmanageable amounts of information; from organising one’s day to planning a travel itinerary or buying a car, lists provide convenient entry points into solving problems of plenty.
B-school rankings – given any methodology – are only one possible sorting order among many of the “lists” that are possible to use for solving the problem we call “which b-schools to apply to?”. Rankings however have various drawbacks.
One, their one-size-fits-all nature neither helps applicants nor b-schools. B-schools in Europe and the US increasingly find rankings to be an irritating nuisance that forces them to concentrate on all the wrong parameters which are increasingly irrelevant in a fast-changing global economic landscape. Two, all rankings do a poorer job of sorting b-schools lower down the ladder, which forces them to consider only a fraction of schools in the market, and are therefore unscalable. Three, spending more resources to improve rankings offers little perceived marginal benefit to the end-user. Whether a rankings survey has been conducted by spending a hundred million rupees in closely auditing every b-school in the country or almost for free by running an online survey – the results have marginal differences and are equally up for debate among its consumers in the absence of any absolute benchmark. Even if you solved the problem, you wouldn’t know you have.
This does not make educational short-listing a wrong problem. Applicants will continue to need lists to grapple with expanding choice and information about MBA programs. But rankings are up for disruption in a world of increasingly powerful data processing capabilities and a larger number of people on the Internet. What is that way? We don’t know yet. But in our view, all existing rankings would find themselves being taken less seriously in the coming years.
We at PaGaLGuY launched our first B-school Rankings in 2008 with 50-odd schools and managed to rank about 104 schools at its highest, using a refreshingly new, honest and better methodology than what was available then. However, 2014 is a changed world and we feel that rather than continue with a dinosaur idea, we should rather suspend it indefinitely until we can find a better solution for the same problem using a technology of tomorrow.
Click here for PaGaLGuY B-school Rankings – The Final Edition