The library on the IIM-Ahmedabad campus — Courtesy photo from IIM
Think Stanford Graduate School of Business is hard to get into? Try the odds at the Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad, which has an acceptance rate that makes Stanford look like community college. More than 200,000 apply every year for acceptance to IIM-A, the oldest and most highly respected B-school in India, but only 450 are accepted, says Director Errol D’Souza, who spoke to Poets&Quants recently in an exclusive interview. The lopsided ratio makes the school’s rate about 0.25%, D’Souza says, reinforcing The Economist‘s famous dictum that IIM-A is “the most difficult school to get into in the world.”
Yet you don’t see IIM-A ranked among the world’s top schools. Despite being placed 31st globally by The Financial Times — and fourth, tops in India, in FT‘s second annual Asia ranking which considers MiM, EMBA, and open and customized exec ed programs — IIM-A is not mentioned in the same breath as the top European schools, or even the top Asian schools like CEIBS, HKUST, or the National University of Singapore Business School, by those in the know about elite graduate business education. There’s one main reason for that: While IIM-A’s MBA-equivalent PGP (post-graduate program in management) is taught in English, few outside India apply to it. Nearly all of those 200,000 applications are homegrown.
“We find it very difficult to admit anybody who is from abroad,” says D’Souza, who is also a professor of economics at the school located in Gujarat state, in the country’s west, about 330 miles north of Mumbai. “We would like to internationalize, we would like to bring in more students from abroad, but we have other programs that accomplish that better than the MBA.” Even so, he adds, things are changing, and big shifts — greater outreach, more partnerships with other schools, and digitization among them — are underway in the way IIM-A works and collaborates with the rest of the world.
A SMALL DENT IN THE ANCIENT CASTE SYSTEM
Errol D’Souza, director of IIM-Ahmedabad, long regarded as the top business school in India.
Few doubt the value of diversity in MBA programs — to find out why, ask just about any B-school professor or admissions director about the peer learning dynamic that arises when disparate voices collaborate in classrooms and capstone projects. In the United States, achieving diversity means raising up voices of women and under-represented minorities. In India, it can mean something altogether different. For IIM-A, the fight to achieve diversity is a fight against the ancient caste system.
India’s caste system is a complex and rigid division of the country’s Hindus into hierarchical groups. The lowest group, known as dalits or untouchables, have for thousands of years been excluded from the most privileged places in society. Legally, this began to change with India’s independence: the country’s constitution banned discrimination on the basis of caste, and government and educational institutions established jobs and admissions quotas for castes and tribes. IIM-A, founded in 1961, has this mission ingrained in its DNA, D’Souza says.
Ironically, this is one of the reasons IIM-A has had trouble internationalizing.
“The current peculiarity of the school is that being in India and being a school which was set up under an act of Parliament, we do a particular type of work you in the United States would call reverse discrimination,” D’Souza says. “We do it on lines of caste, which was a big factor in India’s long history of discrimination. What we did is come up with a plan where we have to reserve a certain fraction of our seats for ‘backward’ castes. And in our case it’s about half our seats — it’s as large as that.”
With a cohort of 450, that means more than 200 seats may go to applicants from tribal areas — members of the lower castes — regardless of the “merit” of their applications. “So because of this system of 50% of our seats actually going to the backward castes, we find it very difficult to admit anybody from abroad,” D’Souza says. “We think that someone who may not be as meritorious, but who has been discriminated against historically, will be given a benefit in terms of entry to the program. And there is a benefit for us as well, in diversifying our cohort.
“Our challenge really is to take the diverse group of students and turn them into people who are ready for working in the corporate and business sector.”
POETS&QUANTS’ INTERVIEW WITH IIM-A DIRECTOR ERROL D’SOUZA
P&Q: What do you look for in a student at IIM-Ahmedabad?
ED: In your part of the world and also for ISB (Indian School of Business), for example, mostly it’s students who already have four to five years of work experience. What we do is we actually take fresh graduates, some of them maybe having one to two years’ work experience, but it’s mainly fresh graduates. So we’re looking at people who are very good at interpersonal skills, people who are steeped in their discipline. So, people who have a background in engagement with the world that they’ve chosen to be in academically before they joined us. And so they have a fairly good understanding of their disciplines. And we’re looking for people who are entrepreneurial and willing to put in hard work. Because the program is fairly difficult — another thing which is talked about a lot in India about our program is how students in our program typically sleep only five hours a day. Because we actually push them a lot to slog it out with various types of courses. We can have surprise quizzes late into the week. We have assignments which suddenly get announced in the afternoon and they have to give it in by next morning.
The whole idea is to prepare them for the flexibility that they would actually see in a real business situation. They may have to work in a business where they work across time zones, you have to be available at any time of day, or whatever is required to make the business a success. And so we basically push them through this mainly for them to understand that this is the way the world of work is, and they must adjust to it and find ways of coming up with their own internal resources to cope with it.
The Indian Institute of Management at Ahmedabad
Yes. We have programs with three schools abroad, so there we manage to get students who come from abroad and study at our institute. So these are programs which we do with the ESSEC Business School in France. We do it with HEC Paris, and we do it with Bocconi in Milan. Their students come and spend a year with us and get a degree with us, and our students spend a year with them and get a degree with them.
We would like to internationalize much more. But we are going to do that through another program which we do, which is a one-year program for executives which is more in line with the way the ISB system works. That is for people who have had some work experience, typically five years, and they come in for a year to do a program with us. So that’s a differentiated program. There we would actually be doing many more internationals — actually we typically have about 30% of students from abroad in that.
How does your curriculum differ from the coursework that Western business schools offer? It’s obviously rigorous, as you say, but are there major differences that you can point out for us?
I think the major differences are that we have a lot more courses on soft skills. We emphasize a lot more on that. So we have courses on negotiation skills, many courses on communication. We have courses on exploring roles and identities, which is a way in which people figure out what is their own internal motivations and how they can hone them for their own purposes. We do a lot of that because we find that our students are intellectually very good, but building on that, working in teams, working with others, is promoted through the softer courses that we have.
There are a lot of leadership courses, too. In terms of differences, we give a fair bit of weight actually to these courses, as well. That is a big differentiating factor.
IIM-A Director Errol D’Souza, second from left, shows off his cricket bowling skills. IIM photo
Do you encourage students to have an international outlook?
How is the PGP program evolving? Do you see changes coming down the road where it’ll maybe move away from the soft skills or even go more into the soft skills? Do you have any comments on any major evolutions in your program?
Over time what’s happening is that we’re finding that we are doing a few more courses which are technical in nature. We’re doing, say for example, data analytics courses, courses on AI. We are starting to do that because we are seeing that firms are all moving in that direction, and they require these skills from our students. Unlike other schools, we already had a fairly good number of quant courses on our campus. So we are saying we add some of these newer requirements that are there, so that students are aware of what is going on in the digital and IT space. But at the same time as that is happening, as people are getting much more technically skilled, we see an even stronger requirement to be skilled in the softer skills.
Because if you can’t talk across the verticals of a corporation, or you can’t be talking about integrating systems; and finally, delivery for managers involves that part as well. It’s a challenge that we are actually coping with: How do we take the technical parts of what’s happening in the world of work and yet allow people to not forget that it’s not just that? That it’s the system integration that actually finally delivers value for firms and customers?
What percentage of your current cohort is women, and is that number going up or down?
It’s going up. It was very low. I would say 10 years ago it was close to 8% or 9% of our students. Today it is about 32% of our students.
Two things have actually happened in the last decade. One is, schools got more sensitive to disability. One of the things that we do, as I told you, is that 50% of students come from backward castes. We take 4% actually of students who have some disability or the other, so we give them also advantage and bring them in. These would be all sorts of disabilities, physical disabilities, that we bring. On the gender front, what we found was that many of our students were actually coming from a technology background and women were not necessarily joining technology institutes, and so fewer of them were applying to join us once they finished their degrees. So we started to give a lot more weightage to people from a legal background, people who came from the arts, people from the pure sciences.
And so that’s how we started to improve the gender diversity as well. It was useful because it also helped the diversity that came into the classroom. It helped students learn from each other — the peer learning improved. That was a very important part which was missing earlier.
I imagine that you have a very high employment percentage for students graduating from IIMA. Do you have any numbers off the top of your head on what that is for the employability?
On the day they graduate, everyone has a job. That’s another peculiarity of the school, I mean we so far fortunately have been privileged that top companies from across the world come and hire from us. In the last batch, the top four consulting firms must have taken 30 of our students. Amazon took about 10, we had the top investment banks take another about 25, 30. And if you look at the fast-moving consumer goods companies like Unilever and Procter and Gamble, they’ve also taken large numbers. So we’ve been really fortunate. Our students are pleased, and that’s why I think we get that large number of applications we were talking about — because people know that once they are here, it’s like you don’t have to be worried about what goes on after you’ve gone through us.
I wanted to ask you about faculty as well. Where are your faculty from in terms of their education?
Most of them have been educated in the U.S. — so maybe about 70% to 75% have been educated in one of the top 25, 30 universities in the U.S. They want to come back to India, that’s how we are fortunate to have them here. So they have been trained in the best schools, and that gives us an advantage actually.
The rest, 20% to 25%, are from one of the top three IIMs in the country.
The Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad was founded in 1961. It is the oldest and, most say, best of the IIMs. India Today photo
If you were having a conversation with a potential student who is, let’s say, considering one of the ABCs, why would they want to go to A instead of B or C? To Ahmedabad instead of Bangalore or Calcutta? What is it about IIM-A that makes it so special compared to those schools?
I would just talk about the school system in which students get inducted into the large, wide, diverse base of alumni across different sectors of the economy in India and abroad. They find that we have the largest number of elective courses that anyone can think of, definitely in Asia if not in most parts of the world — we have about 160 electives. So students can really have a depth of choice.
The electives span things from cryptocurrencies to bionics to theater, and even filmmaking and things like that. And the idea is to basically allow students to pick and choose areas of work and what they think they would want to experiment with. Basically, that’s the idea. We also have a large number of student clubs on campus, unlike the other institutes, B and C: We have something like close to 60 student clubs and they are very active. They call in practitioners from industry and various areas in public life. In a given year they would possibly be having some of the top CEOs coming in to speak.
We have ministers from government, we have presidents come to teach in the program as well as give lectures, things like that. So the flavor is very special compared to other institutions.
Around the new year is a good time to ask this question. What do you feel the new year, the next two years, maybe the next five years will hold for your school, and maybe in general for Indian graduate business education?
For the school, we are actually looking at globalizing much more than we have been in the past. You asked earlier about foreign students; we find diversity in terms of nationalities is low around campus. Because of the historic nature of our location — we are in one of the largest populated countries in the world, and we were set up specifically to promote management in the Subcontinent — we didn’t really focus globally. So we are now starting to actually look at centers of the institute in different parts of the world. We do executive education training in Europe and in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, but we never actually had an extension center. So we’re now setting up one in the Middle East, in Dubai, and we’re about to use that as an opportunity to do more work in parts of Africa as well as the Middle East. That is something we’re focusing on over the next three years or so.
Another thing we’re actually looking at is opening up a sub-school of public policy within the institute. The reason there is special: In an emerging market, one of the big things we’ve found that makes doing business difficult is basically the regulatory environment. And so we want to specialize a lot more around governance and regulatory issues, and use that to convince government as well as talk to businesses about what are the types of issues they can expect to face and how to get around those. As of now we do really a fairly large number of executive education programs with senior bureaucrats in the government — almost secretary level in the government as well as commissioners of income tax and other foreign services officers who are ambassador level and below. We do programs for them. So we want to convert that learning into much more focused ways of advising government on what sorts of processes they should have which would actually make it more efficient for them as well as for business.
The plans are already out for the school of public policy. We have an architect who has already designed the school. We expect to be ready in about 18 months from now. We’ve started to look at hiring special faculty for that school, and we’re looking at it as a very important component of thinking about business in parts of the developing world.
These are two very important things that we want to continue. And we want to continue what we are doing in terms of improving diversity, in terms of gender, in terms of more courses which are fairly contemporary and yet gel with the way the school has been continuing.
Do you have any thoughts on the big picture for the country and graduate business education in India in general? What the next couple of years might look like?
Sure. The next couple of years actually for most of us here will be fairly interesting, because there are schools from abroad which are now trying to set up and get a slice of the pie. We look at that as a very interesting phenomenon which is good for us, because it will help us sharpen our own skills a little more with people, to be a little more careful than we have been on many fronts. That’s why we are saying, “Okay, so if that is coming in here, we have to take the competition abroad,” which is why we are now thinking of setting up in Dubai and we are doing programs and we are in London a year from now doing some programs there as well. So that’s been our response up until now. We think going forward, there are going to be risks which all business schools will face, and the question is, What do you really focus on?
We are seeing business schools which possibly might merge, we are seeing business schools which will just focus on just one particular aspect — maybe they will be schools that will only do executive education and not do MBA programs. Maybe they will be schools which will just focus on a particular type of executives with a certain amount of work experience. How much will be online, how much will be offline? These are things we are thinking through right now. We hope to be ahead of the curve on this one because these are things which are going to hit all business schools. So two years ago we started experimenting with what we call an e-learning program as well. And we are slowly getting into that virtual space as well.
So in the next couple of years we’ll see advances on that front as well? More digital offerings?
Yes, yes, very much so. Because that is a potential disruption which can hit us, and so we want to be very much riding that wave rather than having it wash over us.
DON’T MISS ISB MAY BE THE MOST INTERESTING BUSINESS SCHOOL IN THE WORLD or DINGED BY HBS, STANFORD & WHARTON. A YEAR LATER, ADMITTED TO ALL THREE
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