Part 6 – Day 2 Recap at ISB
HYDERABAD, INDIA Wednesday, March 2, 2011, 10:13 PM
Its been another packed day, with 14 hours of activities! In the morning I heard from representatives of a few of ISBs Centers of Excellence, which are business research programs focused on a specific theme, like entrepreneurship and real estate. This Centers of Excellence model is commonly found in Western business schools as well. The afternoon was interesting too, featuring meet ups with ISB alumni, current students, and administrators. Ive heard a lot of information over the last two days, and I now feel like I have a pretty good handle about how ISBs Post Graduate Program in Management (aka MBA program) works.
Yesterday and today I noticed that the ISB staff keeps hitting on a major value prop for their programtheir effectiveness in placing graduates to jobs. Last year there was somewhere less than 500 students in the ISB program, and all students got job placements. This is a pretty impressive feat for a business school. And the job placements are really strong, here is a sample of job placements for last years class:
- McKinsey & Company 15 people
- Deloitte 20 people
- Accenture 9 people
Take a look at this bigger list of companies that recruit at ISB:
I have to admit that I was a bit surprised to see how effective ISB was in finding jobs for its graduates. Im not aware of any other business school that could claim 100% job placement last year. Their career services team appears really good though, I took a picture of one slide that outlines some of the work/products/services provided to each student:
At the end of the day, ISB asked a really interesting question: as a business school that seeks to grow its prestige and brand, what is one characteristic of the school that should be most messaged to prospective applicants? Many people in my group believed that the answer is job placements: if ISB can promise great jobs for its graduates, then its a compelling place to go for our MBA (and equivalent) degree.
What do you think? Is the most important consideration for an MBA the job you can get when you graduate?