PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings 2009: IIM A on top, Women prefer XLRI and Symbiosis schools the most

View results of PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings 2009
Rankings by Women | Alumni | MBA Students | Freshers | Aspirants with Work Experience
Excusive Insights and Opinions | Methodology used by the Rankings

While it is true that management education in India is evolving at afast pace – what with efforts by business schools to advance technologically, to reach out to and become more relevant to the larger international scene, expanding the relevance of education to specific business domains that show promise – none of these changes are as substantial in a single year as to show up in perceptions of people in consecutive years.

It is hence little surprise that only a handful of b-schools showdrastic movements in the PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings compared to their rankings in the previous year.

Also see: How MBA alumni from 2006 are getting affected by the current economic crisis

The Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad is undisputedly number 1 across all regions of India. Except in among respondents from East India who have rated IIM Calcutta as the second more preferred b-school, IIM Bangalore is undisputed number 2 across all regions.

The Indian School of Business (ISB), Hyderabad is consistently ranked at number 4 immediately after the top 3 IIMs, except among people in West India who rank it at 3 above IIM Calcutta. A pioneer of one-year programs, it seem to be the immediate next choice of people after the IIMs.

Read: How Indian b-schools are evolving from a cottage industry to an organized sector

All IIMs except the one at Shillong feature in the top 10 this year, while all except one schools of management run under the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) feature between top 20 and 30. This is a clear indication that people place the IIM education brand among top 10 while the IIT MBA brand is generally placed later in the top 30.

Last year at the 11th position, IIM Indore breaks into top 10 of the PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings in this edition, one position above IIM Kozhikode. This is interesting, considering that the Kozhikode IIM is older than the one at Indore.

Also read: An IIM Bangalore’s professor’s take on why faculty is attracted to the IIMs and why it might change

IIM Shillong,ranked at 24 this year will take some years to live up to the IIM brand. Considering how tough the older IIMs are finding it to place students for summer internships this year, IIM Shillong will not have it any easier. Prevailing economic conditions will not make this easy either.

Like IIM Shillong, the second campuses of schools such as Institute of Management Technology (IMT), Ghaziabad at Nagpur and Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM), Pune at Bangalore have not been able to cash in on the reputation of their mother brands yet. While IMT Ghaziabad is ranked nationally at 15, IMT Nagpur is 35 ranks lower at 50. SIBM Bangalore is ranked at 33, 16 ranks lower than its veteran SIBM Pune. People are not buying into the brand without taking a reality check on what the school can deliver back.

Also read: AICTE is strangulating quality MBA education in India, says SP Jain Dean

The other well known cluster of schools under the Symbiosis International University do not have a well demarcated position in people’s perception as the IIM or IIT brands do. SIBM, Pune, the top Symbiosis school in the rankings is at 17, two places lower than its previous year’s ranking of 15. Between SIBM Pune and Symbiosis Institute of Operations Management (SIOM), Nasik which is ranked at 67, there are six Symbiosis schools scattered across various levels. This is a place where the explicit absence of differentiation between IIM and IIT schools might be working in their favor and getting them ranked within a very short range of each other. Because each one of the Symbiosis schools have tried to work on a specific niche (Human Resources, Operations Management, Telecom Management and more), people can tell the academic nature of each of these schools from the other, therefore scattering these schools across the rankings.

For the first time, we featured two schools of management run by the government-owned National Institutes of Technology (NITs) – ranked by our respondents as: NIT Trichy at 55 and NIT Durgapur at 74. The reputation of IITs and NITs as good engineering schools does not seemto be carrying through to their MBA programs. In fact, the most preferred engineering MBA school in the PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings is the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE) at Mumbai, ranked at 16. Among the biggest movers this year are the two IIT departments of management at IIT Delhi and IIT Kanpur, jumped 4 and 10 ranks up to register at 21 and 26 respectively this year.

Also see: Sectoral MBAs are creating frog-in-the-well managers, says IIM Indore Placements Chairperson

The two NITs are part of the nine new schools we added to the rankings this year. Midway into the rankings, the department of management studies at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore declared that they were closing their MBA program due to its non-viability. The school had to be removed from the rankings.

The New Delhi-based International Institute of Management (IMI) has been steadily rising across all major b-school ratings and in the PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings 2009, it stands at 31, up three positions from its rank in the previous year. Similar increases are seen by Mumbai’s KJ Somaiya Institute of Management and Research and Welingkar Institute of Management.

Amity School of Business, Noida slides 3 ranks lower in people’s preference to 65, contradicting beliefs that perceptions are basically creations of marketing and advertising.

View results of PaGaLGuY.com B-school Rankings 2009
Rankings by Women | Alumni | MBA Students | Freshers | Aspirants with Work Experience
Excusive Insights and Opinions | Methodology used by the Rankings

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