06.25.08 by Bärbel Schwertfeger

First Indian school with Equis seal of approval

Next to the IIM in Bangalore, the IIM in Ahmedabad is considered to be one of the leading management schools among the six state IIMs (Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, Indore, Lucknow and Kozhikode). The flagship program is the two-year Postgraduate Program in Management. According to the website, more than 100,000 candidates apply for the 250 places in the program. In order to be accepted, applicants must complete the Common Admission Test (CAT), as well as several rounds of interviews and group discussions.

Like all IIMs, the IIM-A is geared towards the domestic market. The majority of students are engineers. A significant portion – in the 2008 graduating class it was 37 percent – do not have any work experience. 76 percent of graduates accepted a job in India. All the more striking is the accreditation, because Equis places high value on the international slant of a school. IIM-A documents this international flair particularly through its international co-operations including that with the French business school Essec (Double Degree) and Duke University (Global Leaders Program).

The European Business School (EBS) in Oestrich-Winkel is also among the partner universities. Participants of the planned full-time MBA can spend a part of their studies in Ahmedabad. In February the private university failed to gain the Equis accreditation for the second time. Among other reasons was its lack of internationality.

Perhaps particularly because of his contacts to the IIM-A, EBS Dean Christopher Jahns gladly presents himself as an India expert. Those who read his statements on India in Julia Friedrich’s book “Gestatten: Elite” (Publisher: Hoffmann and Campe) however will rub their eyes in bewilderment. The EBS Dean gushes about average GMAT scores of 740 at top Indian universities – although the applicants don’t take the GMAT there. “200,000 students apply to a top university,” did he tell the author. 240 are accepted. That it’s “only” 100,000 presumably simply belongs to one of Jahns favorite exaggerations. “Indians filter the truly best from the masses very easily with the GMAT,” he is further quoted as saying. But this is also completely false, since the CAT test – like at every good school – is merely one criterion for acceptance.

The question of whether his statements about India in the book were quoted correctly is something Jahns didn´t want to answer: He just claims that “many things are misquoted” in the book. Skepticism about his knowledge of India however is called for, because by the end of last year the EBS Dean still hadn’t heard anything from the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. The school, which was established by the US top schools Kellogg and Wharton, in January managed to become the only Indian school to be listed in the Top 100 ranking of the Financial Times for the first time.

www.iimahd.ernet.in