Beware if you are going to take your final Admission decision on the basis of these tall claims! This just might be a marketing gimmick and can turn out to be a trap for you to take admission to a particular B-school. Your heavy reliability on such claims may leave you disappointed as once you get into the B-school, the institution may argue and interpret its claims differently from what it looked in its first impression.
While some B-schools genuinely mean their promises and offer and stand by it after admitting students into their MBA programs, many B-schools just use these promises as a bait to get students into their fold and fill their seats.
Let’s first review a few claims that B-schools make and the message that they want to convey to the MBA Aspirants:
|
B-school offers/claims |
General impression/Message |
|
Free Lap Top |
Technologically advanced environment of the B-school |
|
Foreign study trip |
Global nature of the MBA programme |
|
Scholarship |
A discount in fee structure |
|
Guaranteed placement |
Assured Return on Investment (ROI) |
|
Ranking claims/figures |
Proof of the B-school credentials |
While the claims and the impression that B-schools make might be sincere and genuine in some cases, you must verify these claims before reaching to a conclusion. Here, we analyze what could be behind the big claims and promises by B-schools while marketing their brand.
Free Laptop:
Many B-schools offer free Lop Top as an attractive proposition for MBA aspirants. While promising a free Lop Top a B-school generally tries to communicate that it makes you technology friendly from the day you enter that B-school. It gives a notion that the pedagogy and the study environment could be highly technology-based. It also conveys that the cost of the machine is included in the fees that you pay to the institute.
But this might not be true. You need to check whether the B-school is actually giving you technologically advanced environment. You need to verify this with different sources like the students who are in their second year of their programme in that B-school.
Also, as configuration and quality parameters of the products in most of the cases, is not mentioned, you may end up with a Lap Top with miserable configuration and low quality.
Foreign study tour:
With ‘globalization’ becoming the buzzword in business, B-schools offer foreign study tour as one of the special feature of their programme curriculum. B-schools try to tap Aspirants’ aspirations by offering such trips which generally cost around 1-2 lakh or more.
However, promises generally don’t specify the cost of such trips. In most of the cases, students themselves are asked to bear the cost of travelling and boarding of the study tour. The B-schools also declare the trip non-compulsory and students are asked to opt out if they can’t bear the cost.
Scholarships:
Some of the B-schools also offer scholarships which, they claim, are based on MBA Aspirants’ Written Exam scores. However they frame the scholarship criteria in such a way that most of the Aspirant find themselves eligible for the scholarship scheme.
But most of the Business schools which offer such high scholarships design their fee structure in such a manner that despite giving the scholarship the discounted fee is somewhere around the actual worth of their programme would be.
So, you should better analyse fee structure and scholarship of different B-schools before taking your admission decision on the basis of scholarship offered by a particular B-school.
Ranking Claims:
Some B-schools boast their B-school rankings with misleading numbers. For example, you may come with their exaggerated claim of being ranked high in international exposure, their corporate linkage, and particular region etc. To cross-check their claims, you must visit the overall ranking of the authentic publications and go into the details of the same. This would give you the actual ranking of the particular B-school. For example, you might come to know that a B-school that is claiming to be number 3 in a particular state in a particular ranking might be at number 35-40 in the overall ranking list of the same ranking.
Guaranteed Placement:
Last but not the least, some B-schools promise guaranteed placement after your B-school programme. These claims intend to assure candidates of their ‘Return on Investment’ (ROI).
But you must take note that most of the B-schools beyond Top 20-25 never publish their placement report and hence whether they complied with their claims of guaranteed placement is never verified. Make sure that you verify the claims by speaking directly to the passing-out batch of the B-school before joining the B-school.
Stay tuned to MBAUniverse.com for more news and updates on B-school admissions and CAT prep.
