Marketing Business Education: Searching for Innovation

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Article by: S.S. George
Director, ICMR (IBS Center for Management Research)

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The Business of Business Education Contd...

Both these markets have now become more fragmented, dynamic and demanding. Students today are better informed than ever before, and have a variety of educational options and institutions to choose from. Potential employers, faced with challenges of their own, are looking to recruit people who fulfill increasingly tougher requirements. New areas of study are opening up, and at the same time, new demands are being placed on management graduates.

While the demand for business education is becoming more and more complex and unpredictable, the providers of these services are increasingly hamstrung by inadequate budgets and antiquated work ethics and organization structures. The work culture of these organizations is more attuned to operating in the comparatively placid, government controlled economy of the last century. In the absence of funds from the government and other institutions, business education, to be successful, must be managed like a business. Without subsidies and external funds, neither a business or a business school can survive if the scale of its operations falls below a viable threshold.

In much the same way that most of the enterprises in the small scale sector in India are unviable, business schools below the threshold scale will find it difficult to compete and grow.

Scale is important because of the virtuous spiral that signifies success for a business school. For business schools to succeed, they must attract talented students. The best students flock to institutes which draw recruiters. Recruiters go only to those institutes where they can find talented employees. To break into this virtuous cycle, business schools must be able to make large investments - in research, in salaries to star faculty, and in top of the line infrastructure. With the government no longer willing to play the role of a benevolent sponsor, and in the absence of private charitable endowments to educational institutions, business schools must look to other ways to succeed.

To achieve the required scale of operations , business schools must learn to market themselves. Since all business schools know and understand - or are at least expected to know and understand - the principles of marketing, to succeed, a school must market itself innovatively.

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