Friday, October 05, 2012

The Faculty Dearth Goes On

Indian B-Schools are Facing an Acute Crisis of a Faculty Crunch and if Steps On War Footing are not Undertaken, Indian B-Schools might fall short of their Own Quality Benchmarks Themselves

When it started in India a few decades back, it was ‘just another professional course’. Soon Indian management education took the entire world of management by a storm. But as things stand, it stands at a juncture where it might get lost into oblivion in the coming years. The reason can be explained by simple demand and supply economics. The coming up of a number of management institutes in India has in a way afflicted the entire B-school with a unique problem – a problem that has given rise to an acute dearth of quality faculty. As per statistics, there were 600 colleges offering 70,000 MBA seats in 2000. However, by the end of 2009, the number increased to 1,400 colleges offering 120,000 seats. Even considering that one institute needs about 35-50 full-time faculties, 1,400 institutes would need roughly 70,000 professors. In a country of 1.2 billion, that would seem like a small number. But only 40% of this demand is being met currently and the rest is met through part-time visiting faculty.

While one reason for quality personnel avoiding the academic field is clearly the low salaries in India (see chart for the salaries international professors get), another is plainly lack of Ph.Ds. As per the emerging trend in the last decade, B-schools have gradually turned towards taking the services of industry professionals who can bring hands on experience from their respective fields to share real-life experiences within the framework of the theoretical models existing in text books. But the biggest drawback of the presence of a huge number of guest faculties in Indian B-schools is the lack of extensive and quality research work that could prove to be the knowledge base of the future. This is because guest faculty work on per lecture or per class basis and do not have the time or the interest to leave their high paying jobs in the corporate world to indulge in quality research within the university or institute.

Even Dr. Vijay Govindarajan, Professor of International Business at Tuck School of Business and founding director of Tuck’s Center for Global Leadership sounds his concern (read his interview in this cover story package). According to him, the quality of Indian management faculty is abysmal. “The student quality is world-class and as good as Harvard or Wharton. But the quality of faculty is abysmal because there is no research culture in India. If you don’t research, you keep teaching the same things over and over again. Research is the process of discovering knowledge, without which, you are retelling someone else’s ideas.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
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