India, today, has a large number of business schools (almost 2,500). However, the quality of management education in India does not follow a normal distribution curve. There are several issues that plague quality standards in management education, from the operational constraints associated with attracting quality faculty and students, to the need for increasing interactions with the industry. Moreover, students tend to consider business school education to be a conduit to attaining a high-paying job; acquiring the requisite skills for these jobs, however, receives secondary status. Business schools, in turn, have been investing tremendous efforts to ensure that their students get placed, rather than in inculcating employable skills.

Until now, the only sources of information on the quality of education provided by business schools were rankings and accreditations. To bridge this gap, Credit Rating and Information Services of India (CRISIL), the country’s premier rating agency that’s majority owned by McGraw-Hill’s Standard & Poor’s unit, recently announced the launch of a new rating service for business schools in India.

CRISIL, which has already graded management education programmes at 20 schools, has incorporated a unique feature. Each programme is graded on a national scale (relative to other such programmes across India) and a state scale (relative to other such programmes in the same state). This is designed to provide practical decision making inputs to both students and recruiters, who may wish to study in or recruit from specific geographic areas respectively.

According to CRISIL, this is the first step in its plan to extend grading services to the entire education sector. Speaking at the launch, Roopa Kudva, Managing Director, and CEO, CRISIL, said, “CRISIL believes that greater transparency and availability of benchmarks in the education sector are key pillars in the agenda of human capital development in India. We spent a year in developing and testing our criteria and methodology for business school evaluation. Our process uses quantitative as well as qualitative assessment parameters. We are delighted that so far, 30 business schools across India have come forward to get their programmes evaluated.”

During the launch, CRISIL released grades for 24 management programmes, covering 20 institutes from Bhubaneshwar(1), Chennai(1), Coimbatore(1), Delhi(3), Gurgaon(1), Guwahati(1), Hyderabad(1), Mumbai and Navi Mumbai(5), Noida(1) and Pune(5).

"The grading is not a ranking, but it is an in-depth evaluation of the programme," said Hetal Dalal, head of CRISIL ratings. "The process is rigorous and intense. We spend 2-3 days on the B-School campus where we have extensive interaction with students, faculty members, administration staff, to get an overall view of the programme. The evaluation is dynamic and not static in nature." The grading also takes into account information of the alumni, like their performance and whether he/she is able to meet the industry standards. "The evaluation is not a mathematical model with a pre-designed numeric model, it is a holistic assessment," Kudva added.

CRISIL is now in the process of evaluating six more programmes and others will be taken up on a continuous basis. It has started with management programmes and plans to extend the evaluation to engineering and medicine too. “A comprehensive report on each graded programme with insights into student profile, faculty profile, curriculum, and best practices adopted by the institute, will be available free of charge on CRISIL’s website, www.crisil.com,” informed Dalal.

The CRISIL announcement was followed by a panel discussion on benchmarking the quality of management education in India. Rashesh Shah, chairman and chief executive officer, Edelweiss Capital, said, "Today, students pursuing MBA are much smarter and broad based. They are evolved in technical skills but they lack in soft skills like interpersonal and social skills."

Dr Rajan Saxena, Vice-Chancellor, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies that has also been rated in the CRISIL report, was asked about the quality of education in B-Schools and the employability of students. "There is inadequate and imperfect information. The quality front of the education is missed out and is confused with infrastructure and glossy advertising," cited Saxena.

CRISIL is hopeful that several institutes will come forward voluntarily to seek evaluation and gradation. "Seeing the response so far, we are sure that more institutes will come forward to get their programmes evaluated and that they will be ready to share the report with their stakeholders," Kudva announced.