Vital Decision
The process of choosing a B-School is not to be taken lightly, says Dr Chavi Bhargava Sharma

Profile
Dr Chavi Bhargava Sharma is an alumni of Delhi University. She has been awarded a doctorate in psychology and has spent more than 23 years in research and teaching. She has authored two books and published several papers. She is also the recipient of the prestigious WISCOMP Fellow of Peace Award (Given by the Dalai Lama Foundation for Universal Peace). She is also an alumni of the Regional Center for Strategic Studies (RCSS) and has trained in Defence Studies and Analysis.

Manav Rachna International University
Manav Rachna International University (MRIU) is a deemed-to-be university under section 3 of UGC Act, 1956. Built on a sprawling campus of 46 acres, it has state of the art infrastructure and a fully air-conditioned campus. The Faculty of Management Studies, MRIU, strives to provide transformational learning, encouragement, motivation, and facilitation to students so that students know what it takes to make that leap from ordinary to extra-ordinary, and excel in whatever they do.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

The admission season is here, but from the sea of MBA colleges and institutes, how does one know which is the right platform to make our dreams a reality. Most consumers of higher education - the students - take decisions on the basis of word of mouth, on their impressions from college visits, on name recognition, and on some of the hundred or more college guides and rankings that are published each year. The question each student needs to ask even when they make it to the best college in the world is “Is it the right institute for me; will it ensure that my interest and needs are met, will it nurture and train and help me explore and move beyond my comfort zone and excel?” What should matter most is student engagement and student experience; how effectively students use the resources at their disposal; what is the faculty-student interaction rate; time spent by faculty per student etc: To sum up, what happens to you once you are at the institute. Who the students are, and which college they went to matters less that what they did when they got there. The best faculty with excellent research and many published work is of use to you as a student only when that faculty share their knowledge, motivate you, and show how to become the best. If the faculty has no time for you, then their being the best makes no difference to you.

DELIBERATE DECISION
We need to stop and think what really constitutes the right institute for us because we are making a huge investment of finances, time, and energy. These turbulent times have made one thing clea: That business school models have been unsuccessful in many ways. They made technically excellent businessmen but not people who could see holistically.

So what kind of training should an institute be imparting?

Here is a checklist of things that matter:

• The institute trains the students not in the nuts and bolts of business but in analysing and solving complex problems
  
• The institute trains the students to look at things holistically and in socially and ethically-responsible ways
  
• The institute does not train students to be just good employees but also to be thought leaders and doers
  
• The institute focuses on multidisciplinary and integrative problem solving rather than the isolated delivery of individual ‘functional silo’ disciplines
  
• The institute prepares students for the complexities of the real world, which functions in a multidisciplinary way
  
• The institute jettisons traditional 'chalk and talk' lectures in favor of more experiential learning - it teaches by doing
  
• The institute teaches communication, leadership, negotiation, entrepreneurship, and team building - not just data analysis - so that it builds leaders, not just quant jocks
  
• The institute is academically challenging and uses innovative pedagogy
  
• The institute ensures a high faculty- student interaction and is student focused: Nurturing, counselling, mentoring students and focusing on their physical and psychological well-being through sports and other such activities
  
• The institute provides a learning- supportive campus environment
  
• The institute promotes active and collaborative stress-free learning
  
• The institute provides enriching, multidisciplinary, global, and diverse educational experience.

The ranking of the various institutes is the other criteria that students look at. A word about what is unsaid and hidden in these rankings: When you look at these, the first thing you need to check is the authenticity and integrity of the agency conducting the survey, especially when the same institute is ranked differently by different agencies. Rankings are based on widely-accepted indicators of excellence, and they are a way for people to make a preliminary selection of schools they think might be appropriate for them.

Take faculty resources, for example. These are a major parameter for judging any institute. An institute that hires full-time professors with the highest degrees in their fields and pays them handsomely scores above an institute that relies more on lower-paid, part-time professors without the highest degrees. At first glance, the thinking here seems plausible enough: the higher-paid professor is more likely than the lower-paid one to have an impressive curriculum vitae and be a good teacher, and a full-time professor has more time to teach and prepare for classes than a harried adjunct.

Reality strikes
But, in practice, the things that make a professor well known in his field - published articles, groundbreaking research - must compete for his time and attention with teaching obligations. Few schools reward their faculty members for being good classroom teachers. It is universal, however, that a scholar's prospects for tenure and other advancement suffer if he or she doesn't publish frequently enough. Consequently, notes Alexander Astin, that there's actually “an inverse relationship between how much contact students have with faculty and how much professors publish.” In fact, famous professors may not teach much at all, leaving the work to junior faculty. Not surprisingly, Astin's research shows that students at the larger and more elite institutions - institutions better able to lure high-priced academic talent - tend to have "less satisfaction with relationships with faculty and less satisfaction with teaching." In other words, a university may well be rich in faculty resources and poor in actual teaching.

What about institutions that are rich? On the whole, such institutions can spend more money on their students and score well in the ‘financial resources’ category - which measures spending on things such as faculty salaries, libraries and other forms of academic support, and student counselling - than schools with tiny endowments. The catch is that a high level of per-student spending does not necessarily translate into, say, a high level of per-student learning. Just as a better-paid faculty member may not be a better teacher, a highly-paid student counsellor may not be a better adviser. It's the difference between having a well-stocked library and knowing whether your students actually read a lot of books; that is, how often and how effectively do students use the resources provided? Researchers say that the existence of resources- library resources, lab resources, human resources - is a necessary but not, in itself, a sufficient condition for learning. The link between endowments and financial prosperity and the quality of a student's education is pretty tenuous. A school's proficiency at ‘growing’ its endowment or attracting grants does not automatically lead to better teaching and more learning. Having resources does not directly translate into efficient and effective use of the resources for and by the students.

MOre than meets the eye On the whole, rich, prestigious, research-oriented universities are assumed, rightly or wrongly, to provide a better education than other schools. Therefore, university administrators, especially those at middle-tier schools looking to build a better reputation, are devoting increasing amounts of time and money to improving the things that build prestige, whether or not those things improve the educational experience of the undergraduates the institution is meant to serve. If we want a winning cricket team, then a high-priced coach, a brand-new stadium, and a state-of-the-art stadium won't alone help the players win. A college may make large investments yet neglect the needs of the students and other customers.

Simply put, much of what the rankings measure are ‘inputs’, or the resources that lay a foundation for a student's education - things such as class size, per-student spending, and a student's own achievement level. The closest the rankings come to gauging what happens during college is to measure a handful of 'outputs' - that is, what comes out at the other end of the college experience in terms of placements. But the most important factor - ‘student engagement and student experience’ i.e how effectively students use the resources at their disposal - the faculty student interaction rate; time spent by faculty per student, etc, mostly goes unrecorded and is not considered by the ranking agencies.

So, don’t just follow others blindly, but instead, choose your institute carefully, giving this vital decision all your attention!