SPJIMR outperforms peers in Financial Times rankings; NIRF ‘measures wrong things’ in research: Dean

NEW DELHI: The SP Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR), Mumbai, has been the top Indian institution in the Financial Times’ (FT) Masters in Management rankings for two years in a row. Varun Nagaraj, dean of SPJIMR, spoke to Atul Krishna about what the institute does differently, its plans, the future of business education, and the FT and National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) lists. Edited excerpts.

Q. You have done well in FT rankings but not so much in NIRF rankings. Why do you think that is?

Each ranking emphasises on different things and that's why different rankings will result in different outcomes. In the case of FT rankings, the focus is very much on the acceleration that the incoming MBA student gets as they exit the programme. There are other questions, of course, but that is the dominant driver. On that outcome, we seem to be outperforming our peers.

Now, NIRF has a different set of criteria. If you look at the one metric that swings the NIRF ranking, it basically is a 24% weightage on research. On all the other criteria, the various universities and schools are bunched closely together.

Out of the five subdimensions of NIRF, we tend to be in the top five in three of them. The two criteria that we are behind is in research and peer perception – which is very opaque and nobody has any idea how that is calculated.

In research, everybody knows what they're measuring but we all have different opinions on whether they are measuring the right things.

Q. Why does SPJIMR have a low score in research?

Because I think they're measuring the wrong things and I don't agree with what they're measuring. They're measuring two things – quantity and quality. In case of quantity, they're essentially measuring the SCOPUS score, looking at what these faculty have published on the SCOPUS database.

And that's a quantity measure; there is no difference between a high-quality journal and a low-quality journal. It is simply how many SCOPUS journals are indexed. So, if you want to play a low-quality SCOPUS game, it's a very easy one to play. There are 20,000 academic journals in the world and about 15,000 of them are quite useless. And it's very easy to publish in these. Nobody reads them and it doesn't really matter.

It is embarrassing to actually read the output that goes into those journals. I would never have my name on any of those.

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The other part is, there is a black market for papers. You can actually buy papers and get yourself added as a second author or a third for a price. So, a university or individual faculty members can spend a certain amount of money and have papers added on to their name as a third or fourth author.

These things do not happen anywhere else in the world because this way of measurement doesn't exist anywhere else. This is an Indian phenomenon which has resulted in our classic desi way of gaming the system.

Q. What do you think makes a SPJIMR stand out from the rest?

Content wise, I really don't see much difference between the top business schools. I think the difference would be all the other things you emphasise in the programme.We have emphasised innovation for societal impact.

The idea of societal impact was baked into SPJIMR from its foundation. All we are doing is building on that legacy. The purpose of a business school is to create leaders who can make the world a better place. Join a for-profit company but lead with the purpose of making the world a better place. That's been ingrained into the organisation.

The second part is innovation. If you're trying to create society besides creating good people, what kind of tools do you need to equip them with? You need to equip them to be innovators, but innovators with a conscience.

We have specific courses and experiences that look to expand the social sensitivity of students. We send people for a rural internship for five weeks, immersing them in an urban internship or mentoring project for the whole of their first year.

There are courses promoting open-ended enquiry. We have a liberal arts courses where we explore management and capitalism. We're probably the only school of this nature which has a world-class historian who teaches history of business and capitalism.

Q. How has the brand of SPJIMR grown over the past five, 10 years?

Is SPJIMR better known now than it was before? I think the answer is yes, but the reasons are different, depending on which group you're looking at. If you're looking at it as a student, I think it is probably tied into our results by way of rankings. If you tend to do well, articles are written about you or search items that might pick you up. So, it's a virtual cycle, good results drive more applicants to consider you.

We also made a conscious attempt at reaching out to undergraduate schools in multiple cities. Because outside of the NCR area and Mumbai, I'd say our brand recognition is not that great. If you look at the southern part of India, we actually don't get as many talented folks as we should.

Among industry, our brand continues to increase because our alumni keep going there, and keep doing well in the rankings.

Q. You have done well in the FT ranking and you have the AACSB rating. What is next for SPJIMR?

There are three international rating agencies. So you have AACSB, which is American, and we have been twice reaccredited. We have AMBA, which is British and we've been reaccredited multiple times. Then, the third one, which is European, is called EQUIS. The European agencies have been more careful about letting non-European organisations into the fold. This, however, is something they're trying to rectify.

That accreditation would be the third. Schools that have all three are said to have the “triple crown”. That, I think, is a reasonable target for us.

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Q. How do you ensure your courses stay updated?

On the front end of the course, each of the departments has an academic council that will review cases and readings to determine if something needs to be updated or changed.

Then the course runs and you have the students' feedback. And after reading the feedback, I could well sense which courses may fall behind by way of currency. I have an annual review process where my entire faculty of 80 spends an hour looking at the research pipeline, their teaching and other service elements.

We also have an external industry advisory council. They give inputs on what they think needs to be incorporated and so on.

Q. Could you tell us about placements?

Placement for full-time programmes is important and we do very well in that. The business schools tend to host many case competitions that companies run. So, you have many companies now that are using these competitions as a way of identifying talent. Winners basically get offers for summer internships. And in some cases, they might get a job offer right away.

Then comes summer internships. The process that top business schools run tends to be a few weeks of companies coming in to present their cases. You pretty much have most of the students placed in internships. And these are the reasons our FT rankings are high – we tend to do well on these metrics.

Maybe, half the students actually have offers from the companies they interned at. The average salary is Rs 32-33 lakh per annum or something like that.

Q. Do you see business education evolving in any way?

I think the future of the two-year MBA course is interesting. This programme really serves as a finishing school for young graduates. Then these people go into entry-level management roles.

These organisations do not hire because of a student’s great skill but because they're smart. They have already gone through CAT and apart from that, they assume SPJIMR has added some value among these students.

But, I think this is limited to the top 50 business schools out of the 4,000 in India. The top 50 can act as a feeder into these large organisations hiring in numbers and paying good salaries that justify the loans these students have taken. So, if the loan is Rs 20 lakh and your CTC is Rs 30 lakh, that seems reasonable.

But if your CTC is lower, the mathematics of it don't work out. And the tuition can't be that cheap because of the cost of faculty, infrastructure and so forth. So my contention is that there will be a continuation of a highly competitive programme but it will only be a viable option in the top business schools. I believe a lot of business schools in the lower part of the pyramid are going to find it difficult to justify their value to the students.