[PaGaLGuY Article] Seeing through misleading salaries in B-school placement reports

[Obsessed_bout_mba]

Originally Posted by floyd&vodka

So, lets stop blaming only the b schools. Lets start asking more questions and reading between the lines of the media reports as well.

Cheers
Ramesh

Media....

This was presented by one of the so called 24/7 news channel, jus a few weeks before CAT 2007.

1. CAT is an exam which has 3 sections with 25 questions in each of the section with 4 marks for a correct answer and -1 for a wrong answer....they sounded like CAT has a fixed format.
2. CAT is the most toughest exam in the world - CAT aspirants know that its not the toughest but the most competitive and hyped
3. CAT tests a persons math and vocab ability - ..is that so especially the vocab part

Media after After CAT 2007.

1. Ppl felt that CAT 2007 QA was the easiest.....

So media ll always do it job....and they all have a bottom line...money and profit..n very few media cos have the work ethics in their dictionary

Why cant the B schools be ethical
Why cant we have the names of those B schools @ PG if we have the facts in our hand....

[Apurv]

Originally Posted by floyd&vodka

The CTC vs Gross debate ...

The placement season at IIT B is going on. I have attended around 50 PPTs till now. I have not even seen one company which included the "floor space rent" as a part of the CTC. I remember only 1 company which included the training cost in the CTC. Infact, a company would not want to do this since, if it does so, the students would not take this favorably. This would portray a poor image of the company to the students and the company may loose out on some good candidates. Hence, to say that the CTC is a highly inflated version of gross salary, is not exactly true.

Hmmm.. I quoted the example from an actual case that happened in an IIM related to an I-bank, narrated to me at different times by different people form that school. Of course, the example was used to illustrate the extremities of the issue and by no way means that every company adds floor space rent.

Cheers,

[newbiedelhi]

Originally Posted by profootball25

why cant aspirants stop looking for an MBA for the above mentioned aspects

hehe me never looked at it dude. i just wanna get into equity research and i have realised CFA is better than mba for it

[Apurv]

Originally Posted by floyd&vodka

Adding on to this debate,

its not only the b schools, but its also the media which is responsible for this hype. The media always covers the 200,000$ offers, the 40 lakh domestic salary offers, but NEVER mentions a word about the offers which the bottom half of the batch gets in these top b schools.

To give you a personal examply, Aaj tak had visited SJMSOM @ IIT B 2 years back. They aired a 3-4 minute video about the placements at IIT B. In this video, they themselves converted the highest international offers into Indian Rupees in lakhs and announced it as the packages which IIT B students are getting in placements!

Even this report throws some examples. As I said, there are hardly any companies which quote "office floor space" in their packages. Atleast none of the companies in the tier 1 b schools would do so. However, these lines in the media report certainly make more interesting reading.

So, lets stop blaming only the b schools. Lets start asking more questions and reading between the lines of the media reports as well.

Cheers
Ramesh

Agree with the media part. Coming from a media background myself, I can explain why this happens. It's because most journalists understand only the salary part. In any standard newspaper, news about B-schools occurs like
once a week. Now journalists are generalists on all subjects and specialists on one subject (eg - crime, business, politics). For that one b-school story in a week, the incentive for a journalist to really understand the concept of MBA is not much. So he/she sticks to salaries as it's the most glamorous and easily perceptible parameter of MBA.

I do think there will be a day in India when there would be specific B-school beat reporters who'd be hired only to write about B-schools. In the US, Businessweek has a bureau for that which is why their coverage of b-schools is very deep.

One way to tackle the issue is for B-schools to take up this responsibility for the benefit of the industry. A B-school like SJMSoM can invite reporters from Mumbai media for a Workshop on MBA myth-breaking. Host them a lunch and all of them will come flocking. Even if one B-school in Delhi and one in Mumbai takes up this responsibility, it will do the MBA community as such a lot of good.

That issue apart, B-schools are still liable for misreporting salaries, with or without media freak cases like the Aaj Tak at SJM SoM one.

Cheers,

[sarvshwet]

Originally Posted by Apurv

Agree with the media part. Coming from a media background myself, I can explain why this happens. It's because most journalists understand only the salary part. In any standard newspaper, news about B-schools occurs like
once a week. Now journalists are generalists on all subjects and specialists on one subject (eg - crime, business, politics). For that one b-school story in a week, the incentive for a journalist to really understand the concept of MBA is not much. So he/she sticks to salaries as it's the most glamorous and easily perceptible parameter of MBA.

I do think there will be a day in India when there would be specific B-school beat reporters who'd be hired only to write about B-schools. In the US, Businessweek has a bureau for that which is why their coverage of b-schools is very deep.

One way to tackle the issue is for B-schools to take up this responsibility for the benefit of the industry. A B-school like SJMSoM can invite reporters from Mumbai media for a Workshop on MBA myth-breaking. Host them a lunch and all of them will come flocking. Even if one B-school in Delhi and one in Mumbai takes up this responsibility, it will do the MBA community as such a lot of good.

That issue apart, B-schools are still liable for misreporting salaries, with or without media freak cases like the Aaj Tak at SJM SoM one.

Cheers,

continuing.....
thats is exactly what we used to do (atleast i did) when we did not have much info about the schools......
earlier when told about a salary in dollars i used to blindly multiply it with the conversion factor and come out with a huge figure!!!!!!!!

so its not that they do this purposefully
they are just ignorant about the same

[evergreen_cool]

Originally Posted by profootball25

If suddenly this year, A I and K dint publish their salaries ( C will never do this in the near future .. trust me ) ... it wont be difficult to just assume, the salaries have increased in proportion to the increase in other b schools ....

baap re ...some spl reason for such confidence :P

newaz personally i see no problem in publishing the salary figures ...
(names a big no no according to me too..)
salary is one of the most important part of a job profile for most of the people...and any aspirant shud knw wht he stands to get after two years in the coll of his choice...and by any measure its nt the institute's fault if everyone strts dreaming about the figure with the highest number of zeros in the placement report...the thing is mba aspirants shud knw how to take those figures...

but somehow i have lost the will to argue on this topic...the whole placement thing is over hyped period !
(and i am pretty sure most of u wud feel the same after gettin in here)

[nitin43a]

It is very true that the CTC figures do not reflect the actual in hand that you would be getting but that has become a norm now whether in engineering colleges or B-Schools. This is what the companies quote in PPTs and you may not have any idea about the break up until you get the offer letter. In most cases gross salary is only about 80% of the CTC but that my vary greatly from company to company and profile to profile.

It appears that quite a few well-known business schools have been lying about their placement salary figures in public.

Quoting CTC is ok but it would be really sad if some institute institute is simply lying about the placement figures. That calls for a legal action as most of the aspirants consider this is a major criteria while applying for a B-school.

Clubbing International and domestic salaries together to calculate the single ‘average salary’ figure.

Most of the B-Schools do this but this is completely illogical. Domestic and International Salaries should be quoted separately to give a true picture. There are B-schools which quote the domestic salaries separately but these are very few and I hope others will get some wisdom soon.

The companies whose pay packages are reported in an exaggerated manner by the institute don’t mind, because they get free press and become a desired company in other b-schools.

I think this is a pretty immature statement. First thing that any good company looks for is ethics. And if a B-School is wrongly quoting the salary figure of a particular company then it is degrading its image in front of that company.

But it starts bordering on the absurd when the floor space rent of the employee’s cubicle in your Gurgaon office is added to the CTC. The CTC component then shots up to as much as another Rs 4 lakh.

I dunno whether it was just for humor but I am yet to hear about a compnay which adds the floor space rent to employee's CTC []

[convolutedsignal]

Originally Posted by profootball25

If suddenly this year, A I and K dint publish their salaries ( C will never do this in the near future .. trust me ) ... it wont be difficult to just assume, the salaries have increased in proportion to the increase in other b schools ....

Oh I heard IIMC was on the verge of appointing a new director. Didn't know it was you oh all-knowing one!

It is strange how the same people who want the IIMs to disclose admission criteria and methodology want them to keep placement details under wraps.

Actually i was a little disappointed with this article. I kinda presumed that there would be some more figures and analysis, given the quality of analysis I saw in the rankings. All the arguments in this article have been sounded out quite extensively in PG over the past 3-4 years.

So what is really the solution? Stopping placement reports? B-schools are barely academic institutions given the level of focus that exists on getting more employable. Placement reports are an excellent way of seeing where a particular B-schools strengths lie and where you are likely to get placed. Admittedly salary figures can be inflated, but frankly I am usually more interested in the companies that come to campus. If a Mckinsey or a Goldman visits a campus, I don't think I would really bother checking if they pay you 15lpa or 40lpa.

Choosing a b-school is like choosing a stock you want to invest in. And if you are investing in a stock, you need as much information as you can, not less. True, the annual reports or earnings statements may try manipulating the figures through changing accounting practices or putting a positive spin on bad results, but a smart investor is one who can see through the propaganda and try and see if it really makes sense worth investing there.

Take all figures with a pinch of salt, but definitely try and look into which sectors the students are headed to and of course as to which companies actually visit campus in the first place. And a placement report alone can never give you the true picture. Speak to alumni, students and search around in google for any blogs you can lay your eyes on.

Be a smart investor,use all info u can get to make a good choice. Its a good market out there.

[bandari]

i think there is a problem mantioning the names of the instis which hike up their salaries. so let's put it the other way round: which are the instis which have shown, over the yeras, that their placement figues are genuine and not inflated. please name them. it would help aspirants like us in choosin the school

[Ganesh S L]

Well, I just have one thing to ask all the seniors...
When I see salaries like 12 lacs and 14 lacs even for not so great institute, what flashes to my mind is a whooping 1 lac per month.....
I just fail to understand if a person can really be so productive to get a salary of 1 lac per month. If it happens after a period of 1 or 1.5 yrs, it is understandable. But I seriously doubt this 1 lac right at the starting phase....
Please correct me if i am wrong...