Should big salaries be the only concern of our B-schools?

31 March 2008

Our top B-schools have successfully hid their shortcomings behind the mega pay-packets their graduates seem to attract rather effortlessly. How long can they do this?By Shivshankar Verma

The first IIM graduate I ever met was a friend's uncle who had his own business consultancy. He belonged to one of the earliest batches to pass out of IIM Ahmedabad, and had ventured out on his own after more than two decades of working for some of the best private companies. I met him to get his views on a research project I was doing on private sector employment.

It was the early '90s and the brand equity of IIM grads had gone up substantially in the marriage market as mainstream media's obsession with the annual placement season started. I remember, quite vividly, the day I became painfully conscious of my meagre takings after reading about the first IIM fresher to land a Rs10 lakh per year job. Two colleagues quit their jobs after reading that news to prepare full time for CAT. One of them made it and is now marketing head of a media company. The other went back to journalism and didn't do that bad for himself either.

My friend's uncle was very well networked and introduced me to senior managers at some well known companies, who were his former colleagues, to help me in my research. Though he appeared to be happy, it was obvious that he was not doing that well financially. He operated out of a small cubicle in a business centre, without any support staff, and drove an old Premier Padmini.

I asked him why he settled for such a low-profile existence when freshers from the same management institute he passed out more than two decades back were earning much more than he did. I was taken aback when he said he couldn't take it anymore, as extreme work stress was still an alien concept to me. The earlier jobs took too much out of him, he said, and he had to get out before he completely lost it. He admitted he barely earned enough to pay rent for the cubicle and other expenses and was surviving on his savings and some inherited assets. Didn't pick the jobs wisely or patiently and it was always a big struggle to prove himself to be worthy of the IIM tag, he said.

When will they be ready for business education?
When a nephew announced this week that he was quitting his job to focus all his energies on clearing the CAT in December this year, I had no reason to be surprised. He is barely three months into his first job with a leading IT services company, which picked him from campus with an annual salary package which was more than what I earned after 10 years of experience. That is what young professionals are expected to do these days. They see little value in earning experience at a real job. All they want to do is get into that premier B-school at the earliest and land that dream job which will earn them in less than a year what their dads earned in their entire careers.

How many of them are actually ready for business education? How many of them actually develop into mature, disciplined managers at the end of two years they spend inside the pressure cookers that the premier B-schools have become?