Business Schools in US face mid-life crises

"Business Schools in the US are going through a mid-life crises and need an alternative business model. If Indian Business Schools don't watch out, they are headed that way too unless they can do some reverse innovation" said Professor Jagdish Sheth.

The globally renowned professor of marketing at Emory University who had completed 50 years as a B-school teacher in the United States last year and wrote a new book on management education "The Business School in the Twenty First Century - Emergent Challenges and New Business Models" was speaking at a panel discussion at Indian International University organized by Cambridge University Press, Birla Institute of Management Technology.

According to Dr Sheth, the crisis in management education has come about because the profile of the student entering B-schools has changed as well as the careers they are opting for once they complete their MBA course. The curriculum, however, has not been adapted to suit the new reality.

When Business Schools first came up, they were designed for engineers who would seamlessly move into corporations. But today, there are as many students from liberal arts joining the MBA course and most B-School graduates opt for careers in investment banking or management consultancies. "Seventy five per cent of MBAs in the US go on to management consultancies and investment banking and the curriculum was never designed for this," said Dr Sheth.

According to him, that trend is catching on in India too with 15 per cent of MBA graduates going into these two streams. In marketing, the curriculum on branding taught today has become irrelevant as what is needed is grounding in social media and digital marketing but the faculty has no clue about these subjects, said Dr Sheth. Not one to mince words, Dr Sheth said that the MBA course just taught the vocabulary of the industry and did not transfer any indepth knowledge.

While Dr Sheth and the two co-authors of his book Professor Peter Lorange, founding Dean of IMD Switzerland who has now set up his own B-School, Lorange Institute and Professor Howard Thomas, Dean of Singapore Management University pointed out what ailed the global B-schools, Dr D K Bandopadhyay, former V C of Indraprastha University, Dr Raj Dhankar, Dean of Faculty of Management Studies and Dr H Chaturvedi, Director, BIMTECH pointed out the critical challenges facing Business Schools in India.

While China had invested in sending candidates for doctoral programmes abroad to meet its faculty needs, India had adopted ad-hoc methods of dealing with the issue. "It's a very myopic approach," said Dr Sheth.

Despite the challenges, Dr Sheth said he was optimistic that Business Schools in India would find an alternative model. His own model: to create the IITs of B-school by investing in an undergraduate 10+2+5 model for management education. Of this, he said in the five years, the first two years should be spent studying the liberal arts - the classics, philosophy and history.

"This would teach the business leader of the future to be a humanist first," he said.

Source: Press Release