Teaching is my hobby. I have been teaching at various venues for many years now. So, when a local business school invited me to teach banking in its master of business administration (MBA) programme, I happily accepted.
My very first teaching session was a revelation.
I had two consecutive 45 minute sessions, with a 15 minute break in between. In the first session the classroom was full, some 75 students in all. At break time I was getting ready for some tea when the whole class broke into an uproar “Attendance, Sir!”
I was surprised. What attendance? Was this an MBA class or a kindergarten?
I told the class “Listen, I don’t care about attendance. You are paying a lot of money for this MBA programme, and it’s up to you to attend my lecture or not. I will mark everyone present anyway.”
There was general jubilation at my offer. In the second session, I found only 15 students. The rest had gone.
After the class I spoke to the dean. He explained that without 75% attendance a student was not allowed to sit for the final exam. Hence I must record the attendance.
Thereafter several questions kept me thinking. Why were these students doing an MBA? How were they selected? What did an MBA get them? I decided to find the answers, and I did.
The answer to the ‘why an MBA’ was:
- Some girls wanted a ‘professional’ degree to improve their value in the marriage market.
- Some boys would be joining their family businesses, and so an MBA could help.
- A few students had joined to defer the boredom of work.
- The majority expected ‘better jobs’ after doing an MBA. More about this ‘better jobs’ a bit later.
The answer to the ‘how they were selected’ was another revelation, courtesy the marketing team of the business school.
Most MBA aspirants join a coaching class to prepare for the Common Admission Test (CAT). The huge majority do not score high enough to get into the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), Indian School of Business (ISB), and Xavier School of Management (XLRI). They have to go to a lower ranking business school. How to choose which one? Simple, ask the coaching class teacher.
The teacher advises “Apply to XYZ business school. They will get you a good job. I will recommend you.” The happy student leaves, and the teacher calls up the marketing team of XYZ biz school and says “Listen, I am sending so-and-so. Enrol him and send me my usual commission.”
That is ‘marketing’ at some biz schools.
Now - the ‘better jobs’ and the math.
An MBA programme in a second tier biz school costs around Rs8-10 lakh. The best jobs after such an MBA pay between Rs3 lakh and Rs5 lakhs cost to company (CTC), of which the employee gets, say, 80%. Typically, this is a ‘customer relationship’ job, a glorified label for a sales job.
For the purpose of this exercise let’s assume a couple of median numbers.
- MBA programme cost = Rs8 lakh
- Salary = Rs4 lakh p.a. CTC, or Rs3.2 lakh in hand, i.e. Rs26,666 pm.
This means, an MBA program costs about 2-1/2 years of the take-home pay!
Seen another way – what if one takes a student loan to pay for the MBA programme? For a loan of Rs8 lakh, repayable over six years, interest rate 8% - the EMI is Rs14,000 a month. That means over half of the take-home pay will go in just repaying the loan, for six long years.
Is it worth it? What job would a reasonably smart and articulate person have got after graduation? Is the post-MBA job really that much better?
Well, I told myself ‘pasand apni apni’ and continued to teach.
Eventually the classes ended and it was exam time. I set the exam paper, the exam took place, and in due course 77 answer papers landed at my home. I toiled through them diligently.
At one point I stopped. Haven’t I seen this answer before? I went back to the previous answer paper and sure enough, the answer was almost exactly the same. To make sure I checked the subsequent answer papers. In total, seven consecutive papers contained the same answer. Hold on – if the answer had been correct I would have shrugged and moved on, but it wasn’t. It was totally wrong!!
I asked the registrar at the biz school, “In what order were the answer papers arranged when you sent them to me? And in what order did the students sit in the exam hall?” The answer for both questions was – the roll number order.
It was clear. Six students, sitting side by side, had copied the same (wrong) answer from a seventh student. A clear case of cheating.
The next morning I presented the evidence to the dean.
He hemmed and hawed and said “Look, sir, these students pay a lot of money for the MBA. They need the degree. If I take action for a small mistake like this, our school will get a bad name. We won’t get students.”
I understood. The business school was a business. I was being naïve if I expected anything else.
But that didn’t mean I had to be a party to it. No Sir! I stopped teaching at this biz school.
A poser for you
Clearly, an MBA is not about learning. It is a ticket to a job, and a biz school is an employment exchange. Employers prefer to recruit from amongst a small number of pre-selected candidates at a biz school rather than advertise and be drowned in applications. The biz school does the pre-selection.
But why make the students pay so much and spend two years doing an MBA? Let me suggest a better option.
Suppose a biz school starts a ‘business preparation programme” on the following lines:
- Pick graduate job-hunters with a mid-range CAT score, ensuring decent verbal and numeric skills.
- Interview them to check presentability, diction, personality etc.
- Put the selected candidates through two months of training in presentation skills, selling techniques, business terminology, current affairs etc.
- Charge them Rs1.5 lakh.
- Offer them to corporates as prospective recruits.
The corporates will get what they want – pre-selected and partially trained recruits. The students will get what they want – jobs. Biz schools will get what they want – more students. A win-win all around.
Did I get anyone thinking?
(Deserting engineering after a year in a factory, Amitabha Banerjee did an MBA in the US and returned to India. Choosing work-to-live over live-to-work, he joined banking and worked for various banks in India and the Middle East. Post retirement, he returned to his hometown Kolkata and is now spending his golden years travelling the world (until Covid, that is), playing bridge, befriending Netflix & Prime Video and writing in his wife’s travel blog.)
