Rajul Jain is an ambitious 25 year old with crystal clear goals. With an illustrious number of degrees (B.Com., CMA (US)* and CFA), she hails from a business family in Kolkata and has always wanted to pursue a coveted premiere MBA to become a Partner at a VC firm.
“An MBA would give me a two or three notch upgrade. I want to work for a fair number of years before starting up. MBA seems like a fast way to build a network,” says Jain about her career goals.
She is currently pursuing her CFA and is on a sabbatical. It was during this period that she ‘joined Twitter’ and stumbled upon the Founders of Stoa School, who were tweeting about the new-age MBA. She had multiple conversations with them and ended up pursuing an MBA with Stoa School, where she also helped design a few modules.
Stoa School offers a 12 week MBA bootcamp in a community-based learning format. About her decision to join Stoa, she told us, “During my sabbatical, I often used to think of the cost and time implications of an MBA and Stoa seemed like an elegant solution to both (an MBA with Stoa costs INR 1,00,000); with the added benefit of peer-to-peer learning and great chances of finding a co-founder.”
Jain is not alone. There are many students who are now pursuing alternative MBA formats. B-schools in India offer roughly 3,200 seats, but the number of MBA aspirants is 2,14,000 students (approximate number of students appearing for CAT). The most common reasons to pursue new MBA formats include:
1) cost and time efficiencies
2) more updated curriculums (with more recent and relevant case studies)
3) new learning approaches and experiences
According to Ronnie Screwvala, Cofounder and Chairman, UpGrad.com, “The MBA is still relevant in today's day and age; but it needs a full revamp. With data and digital disruption happening, MBAs need to evolve. For example, the way marketing was done - is different today. The way sales was closed - is different today. The way finance was done - is different today. Thus, the generic MBA is irrelevant today, and there is a strong need for a new age MBA.”
New age MBA requires a holistic output that covers:
The foundation of management programs + knowledge of data and technology + different breed of leaderships and people management skills.
A look into new and evolving formats and what do they aim at solving?
1) Pay after placement/ income sharing agreement: Pay after placement (PAP) is a program/ course where the student pays a nominal fee at the onset and then pays a set fee after placement. This fee is determined by the salary the student lands at placement. This model solves for cost inefficiencies. In India, it is currently offered by Sunstone Eduversity and IBMR Business School.
2) Intensive Workshop/ Bootcamps/ Community Learning Models: Intensive models that are developed for high learning . They have extremely contemporary programs taught by industry professionals and not academia. They solve for cost and time inefficiencies as they generally last 4-12 weeks. Examples being altMBA by Seth Godin and Stoa School in India.
3) Hybrid MBAs: Business schools are evolving new models and IIM Udaipur has launched a program where they invite industry leaders and experts for 15 minute online sessions. Similarly, UpGrad.com has partnerships with global B-Schools like Deakin Business School, University of Essex and Liverpool Business School to deliver online MBAs. This model works as asynchronous education is here to stay.
According to Meeta Sengupta, Founder, Centre for Education Strategy, “The MBA provides a certain set of toolkits and these toolkits currently do not include greater impact and business schools are now realising this. For example, the MBA has to reflect the wider impact in the world and measure things that matter in the new work arena. These aspects include: mental wellness at the workplace, care and empathy, effects of climate change etc. The current MBA is extremely mechanistic (in India) and its design has to change.”
When we spoke to multiple folks who have an MBA, Founders and Academicians, they echoed Sengupta’s perspective and believe the following aspects have to be considered to create the new-age MBA.
1) Lifelong learning: the MBA cannot be restricted to one or two years only. With the world evolving so fast, an MBA has to be easily available and possibly grant students lifelong access.
2) More focus on purpose than profit: As Sengupta says, “MBA is about service to the society and profit is only a by-product. For example: we no longer only measure employee productivity at the workplace, but treat the employees as a customer too. That changes the dynamics of how we treat them and what we measure.”
3) Modular or mini MBAs: the MBA is designed to teach leadership, problem solving and critical thinking and all aspects of a corporate business (done through case studies). Most MBAs can only impart toolkits and not so much the real-world experience. Modular or mini MBAs can solve for that and deep-dive into each area through intensive bootcamps. Students can take up multiple mini-MBAs whenever they feel the need for any particular type of training.
4) Access to Global MBA faculty: Sengupta mentions that every-time her IIM - Ahmedabad batch meets for a reunion, they yearn for refreshers. How about a model where Professors from across the globe open up their calendars (for limited hours) to discuss new and evolving MBA concepts.
5) Teaching more skills than concepts: While most MBAs provide strategic toolkits, what is missing is real-life skills. MBAs have to include an option of life skills that students can choose from and master in. Example: Digital Marketing and Product Thinking/ Management.
6) Support for early-stage Founders: MBAs mostly produce great middle managers and hence the degree too is called a ‘Master of Business Administration’. The MBA is not designed for an entrepreneur and here in lies an opportunity. Founders in the early stages could do with structured mentorship and support and B-schools can definitely co-create a new curriculum for Founders.
With current cost structures and primitive learning models, many aspirants including Abhay Jani, (co-author of this piece and Growth at FrontRow) who hail from humble backgrounds, prefer to work at start-ups to ‘optimise for skills’ rather than focusing on a degree.
Like Jani, many students today prefer to pursue the hard path and experience first-hand the journey of ‘zero-to-one’ and this loss of talent (for a B-School) is definitely the gain of early stage start-ups where there is more burning ambition and passion to ‘make it against all odds’.
Notes:
* Certified Management Accountant
Co-authored by Nisha Ramchandani, Manager - Outreach at Axilor Ventures & Writer, Future of Work and Abhay Jani, Growth at Frontrow.
Conclusion of a two-part series.
Part one: https://zoomout.substack.com/p/the-relevance-of-an-mba-in-start
