I live in the Windy City and saw this in the Tribune...interesting how the ISB is avoiding the the quotas. Could more schools be on the way? WORLD World class fits for new India school Northwestern among foreign partners of MBA program By Laurie Goering Tribune foreign correspondent 8:54 AM CST, January 13, 2008 HYDERABAD, India When Aarti Kothari decided she needed a top-quality MBA to further her career, her choices at first weren't encouraging. In a country suffering a dramatic shortage of placements for college students, the nation's best business school, the Indian Institute of Management, had more than a hundred applicants for each seat. Lesser programs, strapped for resources, offered degrees of questionable value. Going overseas was an option but only if she could find the nearly $100,000 it would take to pay for a leading U.S. business school degree. So Kothari, a 26-year-old New Delhi journalist and economics graduate, was thrilled to win a spot at the Indian School of Business, a venture backed by Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the London Business School and McKinsey & Co., a management consulting group. Today she and 424 other Indian students study for their master's in business administration under visiting professors from Kellogg and other top business schools at a state-of-the-art facility in this booming southern Indian city that is home to many technology ventures. Such foreign-supported campuses, many believe, may be one answer to an educational crisis that threatens to hold back India's ambitions to become a world economic power. The Indian School of Business "is definitely not an Indian school," said Kothari, strolling past sleek classrooms full of students giving PowerPoint presentations. "I'm studying in world-class infrastructure with world-class professors." India, with its booming service economy but lagging higher-education system, has one of the biggest gaps in the world between the number of skilled college graduates needed to fill jobs and the nation's ability to produce them. That threatens to put the brakes on the country's economic growth, now running at nearly 9 percent a year. Helping to fill gap The country's National Knowledge Commission says only about 7 percent of Indians age 18 to 24 enter college, half the average for Asia. To double enrollment, it says, India needs 1,500 new universities by 2015, something the country will be hard-pressed to achieve, particularly with a nationwide shortage of high-quality faculty. The country's laws effectively prohibit foreign colleges from setting up campuses to fill the gap. But dozens of universities from the U.S., Europe and elsewhere are finding creative ways to get a foothold in a market that offers both enormous demand and, potentially, enormous profits in terms of tuition and number of students. "It's very, very important to us," said Dipak Jain, Kellogg's dean, who played a key role in setting up the Indian School of Business and who travels there regularly to teach. "There are lots of eligible students all over the world, and not everyone can come to us. If the students can't come to us, we need to go where the students are." In most cases, foreign colleges looking for a start in India have partnered with existing higher-education institutions, offering help with curriculum development and staff training or setting up exchange programs. The Indian School of Business follows a slightly different model. Set up as a new Indian-owned and -managed school, it takes capital funding from Indian businesses and relies on a core group of 24 Indian professors supplemented by visiting faculty from top business schools abroad. Each year, 8 to 10 professors from Kellogg make the trip to Hyderabad, spending three to six weeks each, and Kellogg faculty of Indian descent also serve as three of the institute's seven "area leaders," overseeing operations as well as entrepreneurship and accounting programs, said M. Rammohan Rao, dean of the institute. "The quality of education is very high. Basically they're getting the same quality" as students at Kellogg, Jain said. A key difference, however, is that for $40,000 -- the cost of the one-year program, including food and housing on the sprawling 250-acre campus -- students get no formal degree, just a certificate. That is widely recognized by Indian industries looking for workers but not by India's government when it hires civil servants. Getting around law By law, only schools or institutes affiliated with Indian universities can offer degree programs. But schools that affiliate must, like their partners, comply with complex affirmative-action laws that set aside many seats for lower castes and other classes of Indians. "We don't want to give degrees and come under too many restrictions," Rao said. Foreign education institutions looking to step into India's education gap face other hurdles, including opposition from professors at Indian universities who fear the defection of their best students and faculty. McKinsey estimates that a quarter of India's engineers and 15 percent of its finance graduates are qualified to work in multinational companies, a legacy of what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh calls a "dysfunctional" education system mired in shortages, red tape and corruption. "Foreign universities come for profit, not to fulfill the social agenda," warned Vijender Sharma, a Delhi University researcher on Indian higher education. "If they don't get a profit, they move away. That's the rule of foreign direct investment." Others, however, argue that inviting in foreign colleges may be the only means of improving India's ailing higher-education system to meet the demand of both students and employers. India's Commerce Ministry last year called for opening up the country's higher-education system to foreign investment. India's restrictions on foreign higher-education institutes are aimed in large part at weeding out the legions of fly-by-night operators. India today has 1,800 MBA programs, Rao said, but only 30 or 40 that offer any sort of high-quality training. If India manages to revamp its rules to allow foreign universities to set up satellite campuses, students will have more choices, though many may still find a high-quality "foreign" education beyond their means, skeptics warn. U.S. universities say they are eagerly awaiting that opening. "Northwestern is thinking of creating something in India," Jain said. "I am sure lots of people would like to do something if the regulatory environment existed."

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Article from Tribune on evolution of ISB --

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kryzak

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16 Jan 2008, 11:04

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I'm confused... so what's the issue with this guy's essay?

hbs.aspirant

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I am one supposedly "upper caste" person directly impacted by reservation system, had a lower rank in IIT entrance and would have gotten in if not for quota system (though I spent my student life in worse circumstances than most people who come through reservation), hence my views might be biased. Any non-biased Indian wants to shed some light?

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16 Jan 2008, 11:36

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Kry,

I won't talk about the merits or demerits of "reservations" or "affirmative actions". But having spent 4 yrs at an IIT, I am pretty sure that this guy has just tried to use his "backward caste" to win some sympathy points. Trust me, when this guy gets selected at Stanford for going through such grief in IITs, this guy will complain about how the American whiteboys don't let him shine at Stanford and hold him back. I hate people who try to play the race/caste card everywhere. There is racism in this world, and there is caste-system in some backwards parts of India .. but claiming (In a B-school app) that you had to face grief at IITs because of your caste is pure BS !!!

Some people can drop to just any level to get even minuscule success.

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I quite agree, I think it's just a ploy to come up with an 'interesting' essay. Not to discount the fact that casteism still rears its ugly head quite often in Indian society!

mNeo

kryzak

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oh I see! So it's somewhat similar to the minorities and quota issue here in the US, right? Some minorities use the history of discrimination or slavery or other issues to try to gain sympathy?

I'm sort of ambivalent about the whole issue of quotas/affirmative action/etc... On the one hand it helps those who are disadvantaged. On the other hand, it defeats "meritocracy", which is something I do believe in...

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On the one hand it helps those who are disadvantaged. ...

....who "WERE" disadvantaged.

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The problem is the people benefiting from these "quota" systems are not the most needy. They come from the upper middle class cream of such sector.

The people who truely deserve it arent even aware of the oppurtunity

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filmcity

Although I think essays coupled with test scores is a good way to select candidates, but for affluent aspirants, this method, thanks to liberal use of essay consultants, has become a way to game the system! How come a firm such as MBA Exchange claims that 92-95% of their customer got into their first preference schools? And they get it validated by an independent agency!!!

These agencies, at the beginning of enrollment, analyse the candidate profile and suggest which schools will suit them. They could probably be good at convincing people to select as first choice, the schools they are capable of getting into, if they have a well written essay.

But still, I can't agree with you more on that these consultants make the selection process unfair to the ones who don't go to a consultant. Just wanted to bring in another perspective to look at their claim.

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