Deciding to join a B-School is well at the beginning but choosing an appropriate B-school is difficult. Your B-school must be accredited. But the question remains how they are accredited in the first place.
What are the criteria for accreditation? It is always imperative that we go for indigenous B-schools for their cost, familiarity, and neighborhood. But in the process, you may not get high profile education and returns for your investment in spending on fees. So better study the list of accredited B school and the criteria which make them stand top in the 10 or 100.
While advertising for B-school, they offer many facilities and streams of management. The schools are graded on the types of management they offer. There is vast list of branches in management, like accounting, actuarial science, e-commerce, economics, entrepreneurship, ethics, finance, general management, health care administration, HR, insurance,international business, marketing, production, operations, management, public policy, real estate, quantitative analysis, statistics, and operational research.
B-schools are ranked according to the activities in global indicators for best performance. Generally, the ranking is based on data collected from school alumni from two-year programs. The research is so illustrative that it gives you an accurate idea of what you will get by joining the school.
The indicators or criteria are different from normal ranking like infrastructure, library, faculty, and placement. It studies how the course developed you and considers students’ experience. B-schools, therefore try hard to keep the standards of their alumni as high as they can.
Points for Consideration When Joining a B-School
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- Number of students
- Cost
- Financial help—Sponsorships or Scholarships
- Opportunity cost
- Salary —within 3 months of completion of the course or two years of completion of course
- Female faculty
- Female students
- International faculty
- International students
- Seniority of faculty
- Completion of an internship
- Job offers
- Accepted job offers
- Overseas experience—internship or exchange
How much does it cost?
Considering these criteria, topper schools such as Stanford get the highest credentials with salary for students to the tune of $215,000 which is 144 times higher than the salary from their previous job before joining the school. Surely it is the best return of your investment of time and money. So, although numerous B-schools are showing what they offer, the end result is the most important.
The various indicators for top-ranking schools are decided from surveys of alumni about how they have grown their career from salary enhancement to progression. At least 20% of students should contribute to the survey. From the statistics, 59% rating is from the alumni, 11% from school data, 31% from accounting and remaining from research. To ensure this, students’ data is collected from the last three-year or two year-courses and balanced against the salary criteria to ensure a 50-50% split.
The salary evaluates the money you have invested in such a costly education after completing your MBA. That includes the increase thereof and its relevance with tuition cost, opportunity cost, financial help and loss due to non-working course period. However, extremes on both ends of the spectrum in the paying jobs are excluded and the average salary is considered. Secondly, the number of faculty doing research, and publishing papers, in 50 prestigious journals known internationally, and the number of students In the process of getting their doctorates are also considered.
Extra
Since this is the global ranking we are talking about, the number of international students, faculty board directors, and languages are important too. The existence of an exchange program for internships is also considered. Surprisingly, global online MBA programs are also considered in this era. Normally, they would be ignored on account of their dogma about these programs not being ‘true’ degrees in the educational sense, because there is no ‘classroom schooling’.
Lastly but the most important is the number of female students, faculty and board directors. A more indicative picture of the B-school in consideration is revealed from these indicators. Many schools may advertise their glossy pictures from these rankings, but we can evaluate the credentials of the B-school.
