© Priya Narayanan, Assistant Professor of Marketing, IIM Kozhikode. Views are personal.

This article was first published online on December 13, 2024 as a special feature in the IIM Ahmedabad alumni magazine WIMWIAN and is available here on IIMA’s website for the magazine. Note: I hold an MBA (the two-year full-time kind!) and a PhD, both from IIM Ahmedabad. The programs that I teach at IIM Kozhikode are listed at the end of the article.

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Recent months have witnessed an emerging debate on the relevance of the two-year full-time MBA programmes across B-schools in India. With the rise in online and hybrid programmes boosted by the pandemic, and prospective students reconsidering spending two full years on academics, the flagship postgraduate programme at IIMs and other B-schools is under scrutiny.

To understand the issue, it is important to note that IIMs, especially the older IIMs, had historically been endowed with the mandate of training managers for the country. These institutes did so through rigorous academic programmes spanning a vast curriculum traversed over two years, and churned out general managers who could hold their own in any field.

The evolving MBA

Over the years, many things have changed but many things have held steady. Demand for the two-year full-time MBA (referred to as PGP, using legacy terminology) continues unabated: the most recent 2023 edition of the Common Admission Test (CAT) that originally provided admission to the IIMs but is now adopted by several other B-schools was written by 2.88 lakh candidates, an increase of 30% over the previous year. Clearly, the numbers attest to the popularity of the PGP.