Revamp management education

It is nobody’s case that management institutes should stop listening to the needs and wants of industry. But they cannot afford to be perceived as placement agencies rather than educational institutes, says Vasant V Bang.

EVEN before the current financial meltdown, scholars from within the management education fraternity had questioned the ways of management schools. Henry Mintzberg wrote a book titled Managers, not MBAs. Last year Harvard professors Rakesh Khurana and Jim Heskette wrote about deprofessionalisation of management education. Joan Magretta a former editor of Harvard Business Review wrote: “Leading business schools certainly played a role in legitimising the culture of easy money in 1990s. The pitch business schools made to the students in the late nineties was: you shall need connections. We have got them.”