School Ratings

Business School Ratings and Choice of the School - How to Decide

You must do good home work on the school you want to get into after you decide to join a business School. It is not only expensive but an investment too. So you really need to zero in on the school you want to go to. There are a number of ratings available to confuse the aspiring student. Each of them uses different factors in arriving at the ranking. They may not be easily comparable. So you must consult more than one source and dig into the factors and the weights used in ranking.

The rankings may not apply to very sector focused program like health or green marketing or pharmacy.

Business week has been doing a pretty good job of putting together the ratings of different categories of programs like under grad, grad, executive.

Go to the Business week site and search for MBA program ratings. You can see all different types of programs. For each program the ratings are done in groups. You can look at all the schools. When you click on the school you will get all the details like - the faculty strength, number of majors, mean years of experience, the number of applications, acceptance rate and so on. The rounds for admissions and the dead lines.

Admission Tests And Scores 

If you are going to Indian schools, they generally have admissions only once a year. Most of them use CAT scores. CAT is common admission test conducted by Indian Institutes of Management (Considered top ranking). You have to appear for CAT (Usually on third Sunday of November.). CAT may be available again on line. You can follow from there to join in June of the next year. If you are applying from other countries you can take GMAT. The scores are accepted in these schools too including IIMs and Indian School of Business.

The CAT scores are given a good weight in the selection process and interview calls after the cat examination. Your academic record, CAT score and Interview together will be taken for admission in IIMs. Your job experience also counts. Being in the 95-100 th percentile in CAT will be very helpful

GMAT academic back ground and the essay play a significant role in the US schools. You must consult the schools web sites for details.

To give you an idea an year ago the GMAT scores at University of Chicago, bus school were in 660-760 range, at Harvard it was 670-760 with a mean of 719.Chicago program is 21 months and Harvard is 18 months. The months of experience at Chicago was 36-58.

Interviews and Group Discussions 

The high rankers are called for Group discussion and Interviews by Indian Business Schools. Each School conducts its own group discussion and interviews. Each IIM also conducts its own group discussion and interviews. All the schools do this at different cities in India and the students are assigned a to one of centers. This is a very important step and must be done properly.

Schools overseas seem to use essay and telephone interviews. The essay seems to have very significant impact on the admission decisions.

Costs 

The fees are revised every year. The following information gives you some idea of the range of finances needed.

An year ago the direct costs at Chicago were $101,013. Both Non resident and resident was same. At Harvard the direct cost were $106,880 In a place like Arizona State the direct costs were $38,390 and non-resident was $65,320. Please remember direct costs are only for the school tuition and related expenses. Living expenses are not included. To know what it might cost in total, that is inclusive of living expenses estimate you should look at the annual budgets.

The IIMs in India would cost around 9-12 lakhs rupees for Indians living in India. The fee structure varies from IIM to IIM so you need to see for each IIM. These being under Ministry of Human Resources, Government of India, are less expensive but the rate of admission being very low it is hard to get in. Private schools cost more. For Indian NRIs and foreign students the fee structure is different. The NRI should refer to web sites to get the exact fees.

Program structures 

The first year of the program is very exam oriented. You get a basic exposure to all the business subjects like marketing, finance, Operations management, Human resource development management and so on. It is in the second year you actually take more courses in one or two disciplines. Despite many new areas, Marketing and Finance are the most popular specializations as large percentage of job offers come from these two areas in the final placement.