B-school rankings: India's top 50

It all began with the shortlisting of 136 institutions, identified from the last five years' rankings conducted by four magazines. We wrote to each B-school, requesting them to participate in our review and ranking exercise.

Fifty-six institutions expressed interest in participating in the survey. Two institutions allowed us to review them, but explicitly refused to participate in the rankings (MICA, TISS). We did rank them based on available data, since we believed the students must know where they stand.

Methodology behind the ranking
The process was two-fold. We visited each institute, with an express intention to review* the campus, the kind of facilities available, the resources, faculty etc, and also to check/ verify the avaiable data. We interacted with the head of the institution, faculty, staff and the students out of the 54 institutions we visited, 12 institutions did not provide data, so they were left out of the rankings. 

We also have attempted to rank the top 12 institutions based on their annual reports, mandatory disclosures, and in some cases, publically available data. We also weeded out or normalised unsubstantiated claims made by some institutes by veryfying them with the data submitted to relevant authorities like AICTE, UGC and the Ministry of HRD. Data found incommensurate with the supporting documents was suitably corrected.

The data finally gathered was processed on the basis of the following criteria [in the table alongside]. Each data set has been normalised in relation to either the student body or with the core faculty. The data has been evaluated on the basis of three parameters namely Input, Process and Output, with weights for component parameters as given. The formulae used for normalisation, as well as individual scores would be shared with each of the participating institution in the coming months.

The top 50 B-schools list is a result of analysing 136 B-schools that we shortlisted from the B-school rankings done by four magazines over the past five years.

*These two colleges participated in the survey process, but not in the ranking process.

The 50 institutes ranked in the survey are by no means the complete list of say, the best 5 percent of the 2000 odd B-Schools in the country.

We had identified nearly 86 more schools, that when normalised over five years, could occupy the same slot. And some of them like IIM Lucknow, SP Jain, NMIMS, GIM, SIBM, SCMHRD and KJ Somiya, all the Departments of Management Studies at IITs, would have qualified to be the top 50 list.

But unfortunately most of the these colleges refused to participate in the survey. Some like NMIMS, SIBM and SCMHRD, did allow us to review their campus, but for reasons unknown to us, did not provide us the data. And for most of these colleges we also could not gather sufficient information from the public domain. However, we believe that non-submission to our ranking scrutiny doesn't alone take them out of the consideration set for students and hence have listed them them out. Hopefully, next year this list will be shorter..