What is an MBA?
MBAUniverse.com Bureau

What is MBA education all about?

What is it supposed to possess?

The MBA qualification broadens and enhances knowledge and should be viewed in a sense of building up skills. It is utilized to find solutions to business issues. During the MBA course, students imbibe the capability and skills to maximize individual and organizational productivity. At the end of an MBA program, one emerges with an enhanced level of functional, managerial and business issues as well as new conceptual skills. Students are ready to meet the demands of the marketplace.

According to Dr. P Chandra, Director, IIM Bangalore, "Management education is about learning how to build and mould innovative organizations. Its about understanding how organizations contribute towards their objectives. Management education inculcates in one the tools of analysis, it paves the way for building managerial perspectives and it elucidates how the economy works within a society. "

A look at the evolution of an MBA program offers interesting insights. The first MBA was developed at the Tuck School in Dartmouth (New Hampshire) in the US during the early years of the last century. It was originally a largely administrative qualification with an emphasis on finance and accounting. The program remained more or less unchanged until the 1950s when the new business school at the Harvard developed teaching based around real-life case studies, the Case Method: a methodology which remains a benchmark of most business school training to this day. To quote from the Harvard Business School Website, "We believe that the Case Method is by far the most powerful way to learn the skills required to manage and to lead. The Case Method forces students to grapple with exactly the kinds of decisions and dilemmas managers confront every day. In doing so, it redefines the traditional educational dynamic in which the professor dispenses knowledge and students passively receive it. The Case Method creates a classroom in which students succeed not by simply absorbing facts and theories, but also by exercising the skills of leadership and teamwork in the face of real problems."

In India, management education is barely 50 years old. It began in the 1950s as a part-time education for practicing executives; only a few universities offered full-time management degrees. In 1961, the Government of India established IIM Calcutta and Ahmedabad in collaboration with the Sloan School of Management, MIT, and the Harvard Business School respectively. A full-time PG degree program of international quality in management was launched at the IIMs in India. By 1990, 82 university-based departments and schools of management were functioning in the country.

Post liberalization, management education sector saw a massive growth. According to experts, there are close to 1800 B-schools operating in all parts of the country.