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Business Education
ome October, the portals of IIM Indore, one of India’s leading postgraduate management institutes, will welcome another batch of students, albeit with a difference. This year, 120 young minds, fresh from school, will take admission in IIM Indore’s newly launched Integrated Post Graduate Programme (IPGP). If the students stay the course, five years down the line they will be awarded the coveted IIM-MBA degree. Students who choose to quit after three years, will be given diplomas equivalent to a BBA degree. A first in India, the IPGP programme has generated much interest and debate. The education circle is busy debating the pros and cons of integrating the undergraduate and postgraduate management education. Though many have praised the course as the need of the hour, some including those in the highest echelons of the education sector have expressed doubts on the ‘experiment’. Chairman, All India Council for Technical Education and Governing Board Member, SS Mantha, has not been too supportive of the new endeavour – “Courses where students go into management straight after school raise questions because they have no domain knowledge which they can build upon.”
New Appointment | BR Ambedkar Open University
New VC of BRAOU Appointed Dr P Prakash has been appointed as the new Vice Chancellor of BR Ambedkar Open University (BRAOU) in Hyderabad. He is presently working as the Additional Secretary of University Grants Commission (UGC) at New Delhi. An alumnus of Osmania University, Prakash received the CSIR national scholarship and was also conferred the Young Scientist Award by the Indian Botanical Society. He is the former registrar of Urdu University, Hyderabad, UGC.
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• Osmania University • BR Ambedkar Open University • Jammu Central University
Pros & Cons Certainly, Mantha’s observation raises pertinent questions. On the one hand, there are people like Dr Rajan Saxena, Vice Chancellor and distinguished Professor of Marketing, Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai and ex-director, IIM Indore who contend that BBA programmes — management courses in their own right — are to be studied straight after school. Saxena says, “Undergraduate and postgraduate management programmes f u l fi l d i f f e r e n t p u r p o s e s . ” T h e undergraduate programmes are aimed at preparing first line supervisory and executive staff, both for front-end and back-end positions in the BPO industry. In contrast, students passing out of postgraduate management courses are absorbed in managerial cadres across the industry. Hence, Dr Saxena believes that integrating both programmes simply for the sake of creating better managers may confuse the purpose of each course. On the other hand, Mantha says that s u p e r- s p e c i a l i s a t i o n a t t h e undergraduate level is a no-no. His opinion is built on the assumption that management education is an extension September 2011 EduTech
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