There is something quietly unsettling about watching a classroom full of eager young minds rehearse presentations on disruption — slides polished, vocabulary borrowed from the latest business bestseller — and yet struggle to articulate why the problem they are solving actually matters to a human being.
After 14 years of teaching management studies, and nearly as long working with social organisations and industrial enterprises across India, I find myself returning to the same uncomfortable question: are we producing managers, or are we producing mimics?
This is not a question asked in bitterness. It is asked in the spirit of what educators have always owed their students — honesty.
And honesty, at this particular juncture in Indian management education, demands that we examine not merely what is being taught, but what has been quietly abandoned, what institutional incentives have quietly displaced, and what the consequences of this displacement are for the economy, for organisations, and for the young people themselves who invest enormous financial and emotional capital in the MBA dream.
So,
India today hosts over 5,500 institutions offering MBA or PGDM programmes, producing upwards of 3.5 lakh (350,000) management graduates annually, according to AICTE data. In sheer numerical terms, this makes India one of the largest producers of management graduates in the world.
China, by comparison, produces approximately 2,00,000 MBA graduates per year from a far more curated pool of accredited institutions.
The United States, the historical origin of the MBA form, produces roughly 2,00,000 MBAs annually — but from programmes that are embedded in a longer tradition of liberal arts education, research culture, and industry-academia linkage.
The comparison is not merely quantitative.
The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB), which accredits the world’s top business schools, had accredited only 14 institutions in India as of 2024 — compared to over 500 in the United States and a growing number in China. The Financial Times Global MBA Rankings of 2024 feature only two Indian institutions in the top 100. What this data quietly tells us is that the extraordinary proliferation of management education in India has not been matched by a commensurate rise in quality, rigour, or global recognition?
One must be careful, of course, not to treat accreditation rankings as the only measure of educational worth. Rankings, as sociologists of education have long argued, embed particular ideological assumptions about what constitutes excellence. But the gap between the volume of our ambition and the depth of its outcomes deserves serious attention, not defensiveness.
Now,
To understand why so many institutions are running MBA programmes that are, at best, adequate and at worst, a disservice to students, one must understand the institutional logic that drives them. Drawing on Sociologist Burton Clark’s classic analysis of higher education systems, we can observe that Indian management education has, over the past 2 decades, been shaped primarily by market forces rather than academic or state coordination. In this environment, what gets rewarded is not depth of learning but visibility in the placement season.
The result is a peculiar but entirely predictable phenomenon: institutions optimise for placement statistics rather than for learning outcomes. The curriculum becomes a vehicle for employability theatre. Courses are added not because they represent intellectual growth or practical necessity, but because they carry the right keywords in an employer’s job description.
A decade ago, every institution added entrepreneurship. 5 years ago, it was design thinking. Today, the phrase that appears on nearly every programme brochure — sometimes in larger font than the institution’s own name — is AI and Analytics.
This is not a criticism of artificial intelligence as a field of study. It is an observation about the sociology of curricular fashion, which the educationist Michael Apple would recognise as the process by which dominant economic interests shape what counts as legitimate knowledge. When a subject enters the MBA curriculum primarily because it is trending on LinkedIn rather than because its foundational concepts have been thoughtfully integrated into a broader intellectual architecture, it tends to be taught superficially, consumed instrumentally, and forgotten rapidly.
The student who completes a module on AI analytics may be able to recite the difference between supervised and unsupervised learning. They are far less likely to be able to ask: what are the ethical implications of algorithmic decision-making in hiring? What organisational cultures foster meaningful data literacy? These are the questions that require not more technology training, but more philosophy, sociology, and history — precisely the subjects that have been squeezed out of management curricula in the name of relevance.
And,
No conversation about the quality of management education can avoid the faculty question, and yet it is the one that most institutional leaders are understandably reluctant to address with full candour. India faces a significant shortage of doctorally qualified management faculty. The All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) consistently reveals that a substantial proportion of faculty in business schools — particularly outside the tier-one institutions — hold postgraduate degrees as their highest qualification, often an MBA from an institution not unlike the one they now teach in.
This creates what one might call a pedagogical recursion problem: instructors who were trained in a system with limited research exposure, limited critical inquiry, and limited connection to global scholarship are now responsible for producing the next generation of managers. The knowledge transmitted is, by necessity, largely tacit, anecdotal, and untested against the rigours of peer review or comparative analysis.
By contrast, business school faculty in the United States and the European Union are almost universally required to hold doctoral degrees, and many top-tier Chinese business schools — particularly those affiliated with institutions like Tsinghua, Fudan, and CEIBS — have invested heavily in attracting faculty with international doctoral training. The CEIBS model, built on a China-Europe partnership, explicitly attempts to bridge Eastern and Western management traditions with research-grounded faculty. India’s equivalent ambitions, though articulated in policy documents, have not always found their way into practice, particularly beyond the IIMs and a handful of autonomous institutions.
This is not a counsel of despair for dedicated faculty across the country who teach with genuine commitment and intellectual seriousness. It is a structural observation. Individual excellence cannot substitute for systemic reform. And the reform must begin with an honest acknowledgement that competitive faculty compensation, doctoral training support, and research infrastructure are not luxuries — they are the foundations upon which credible education rests.
If the institutional logic creates one kind of distortion, the student pipeline creates another. Across fourteen years of teaching, I have observed a pattern that I suspect many colleagues would recognise: students who are extraordinarily motivated to secure an MBA, and yet arrive with a limited appetite for the intellectual discomfort that genuine learning requires. This is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to the incentive structure they have grown up in.
The Indian education system, from school through undergraduate college, has — with some notable exceptions — rewarded memorisation, pattern recognition, and performance in standardised assessments. The capacity for what the social psychologist Carol Dweck calls a growth mindset, for sitting with ambiguity, for questioning one’s own assumptions, is not systematically cultivated. When students arrive at a business school and are asked to engage with a case study not as a puzzle with a correct answer but as a window into human complexity, many find the experience disorienting.
More troubling, perhaps, is what I can only describe as a certain atrophy of the imagination when it comes to sectors and problems that do not carry the prestige of high-paying corporate roles. Students who demonstrate genuine intellectual curiosity in discussions of, say, rural supply chains or public health management often modulate that curiosity when the conversation turns to careers. The aspiration, shaped partly by family expectations, peer competition, and social media, converges on a narrow band of roles in marketing, finance, and consulting.
The dearth of critical thinking is not, however, disconnected from the curriculum design. When programmes are structured around conventional functional silos — marketing, finance, operations, HR, entrepreneurship — with little integrating intellectual thread, students learn to think within disciplines rather than across them. A management graduate who cannot read a Foucault essay, who has never studied development economics, who cannot situate Indian capitalism in its historical context, is a management graduate who will struggle to understand organisations as social phenomena rather than merely as systems to be optimised.
This brings us to what I consider the most significant structural gap in Indian management education: the near-total absence of liberal arts. The case for liberal arts in business education is not sentimental. It is thoroughly practical. The skills most consistently identified as differentiating high-performing executives — empathy, ethical reasoning, historical perspective, cross-cultural communication, comfort with complexity — are precisely the skills that humanities and social science education cultivates.
Harvard Business School (HBS), for all the legitimate critiques one might level at it, has long insisted on the case method precisely because it is an exercise in situated judgment rather than algorithmic problem-solving.
The Yale School of Management builds its curriculum around the stakeholder — society, the state, capital, labour — recognising that business does not occur in a social vacuum. Programmes like those at London Business School or INSEAD draw explicitly on the diversity of intellectual traditions that their multinational student bodies and faculty bring.
India’s National Education Policy 2020 recognised the importance of multidisciplinarity and holistic education, and there is genuine promise in its vision. But implementation has been uneven, particularly in stand-alone management institutions that are not part of broader universities. The flexibility that NEP envisions — students choosing courses across disciplines, building portfolios of knowledge rather than following rigid programme tracks — is still more aspiration than reality in most MBA classrooms. Structural inertia, regulatory frameworks, and the continuing pressure of placement statistics conspire to keep the curriculum narrow.
There is also a deeper question about what kind of professionals we are trying to produce. If the goal of management education is to produce individuals who can navigate the profound uncertainties of the twenty-first century — the ecological crisis, the democratic deficits of digital platforms, the disruptions of automation, the persistence of inequality — then a curriculum dominated by marketing funnels, financial modelling, and entrepreneurship pitch decks is, at best, insufficient preparation.
Last but not least,
The supreme irony of the current moment in Indian management education is that the intense focus on placements — the very focus that has driven so many curricular and institutional choices — is producing diminishing returns. The ‘placement season’ remains the centrepiece of institutional identity, the metric by which families evaluate admissions decisions, and the figure most prominently displayed on institutional websites.
According to the India Skills Report 2024, only 46 percent of MBA graduates are deemed employable by industry — a figure that has shown only modest improvement over the decade. Median starting salaries, adjusted for inflation, have not grown proportionally to the increase in fees at the majority of institutions. The premium sectors — investment banking, management consulting, and FMCG brand management — absorb a small fraction of graduates from a small fraction of institutions. For the vast majority, the MBA represents not a transformative career accelerator but a credential that carries diminishing signal value in an increasingly credential-saturated market.
This is what the sociologist Randall Collins, in his theory of credential inflation, predicted as a systemic outcome of educational expansion without corresponding labour market transformation. When a credential becomes widespread, its informational value declines. Employers respond not by abandoning the credential but by adding tiers — tier-one institutions, platinum tier, elite-only hiring — which simply relocates the sorting mechanism one level up the institutional hierarchy, without any underlying improvement in the quality of human capability being developed.
For students from middle-class families who have taken education loans of five to fifteen lakhs to attend programmes that promise but do not consistently deliver meaningful career advancement, this is not merely an intellectual problem. It is a financial and emotional one.
None of this is written to suggest that management education in India is without worth, or that the institutions and individuals working within it are not doing genuinely important work under difficult constraints. India needs well-prepared managers. The complexity of its development challenges — the energy transition, the agrarian transformation, the health infrastructure deficit, the digital economy — will require professionals of considerable sophistication and ethical seriousness.
But producing those professionals requires a willingness to have an honest conversation about what is and is not working. It requires institutions to ask not merely ‘how do we improve our placement statistics?’ but ‘what kind of human being are we trying to develop, and what does that require of us as educators?’ It requires students to ask not merely ‘which programme gives me the best ROI?’ but ‘what knowledge and capacity will I need to navigate a world of genuine complexity?’
It requires regulators to move beyond input-based compliance — auditing the number of books in a library, the square footage of a campus — toward outcome-based accountability for learning, critical thinking, and professional preparation. It requires industry partners to stop treating campus hiring as a convenience and start engaging with academic institutions as genuine intellectual partners in workforce development.
And it requires faculty — those of us who have chosen this work — to model the very qualities we are trying to cultivate: curiosity, rigour, the willingness to be wrong, and the courage to speak plainly about what we observe.
A student once asked me, in the middle of a particularly difficult class on organisational behaviour, why we were reading a paper by a sociologist from the 1950s. ‘Is this going to come in the placement interview?’ she asked, with perfect sincerity.
I told her that it might not. But that understanding how power operates in organisations, how hierarchies reproduce themselves, how informal norms shape formal decisions — these were things she would encounter every working day of her life. The paper was not a relic. It was a lens.
She looked unconvinced. But she read it. And at the end of the course, she told me it had changed how she saw her internship experience. That is not a placement statistic. It is something smaller, and considerably more important.
Management education in India stands at a crossroads. The path of least resistance — more courses, more buzzwords, more placement drives — is well-worn and well-lit. The harder path, of genuine intellectual seriousness, curricular courage, and institutional honesty, is less travelled.
The question is whether we have the will to walk it.
Views of the author are personal and do not necessarily represent the website’s views.
Dr. Jaimine Vaishnav is a faculty of geopolitics and world economy and other liberal arts subjects, a researcher with publications in SCI and ABDC journals, and an author of 6 books specializing in informal economies, mass media, and street entrepreneurship. With over a decade of experience as an academic and options trader, he is keen on bridging the grassroots business practices with global economic thought. His work emphasizes resilience, innovation, and human action in everyday human life. He can be contacted on jaiminism@hotmail.co.in for further communication.
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