IIM - India's best placement agency!

It is that season of the year when you'll see a deluge of press releases from IIMs announcing their summer placement results with pride (click here and here). Here is a peanut to crunch on. When was the last time you heard something about an IIM that doesn't relate to placements, reservations or fee-hikes? There might be, but no one cares.

At present, IIMs are more of a placement agency camouflaged under the pretense of being an educational institution. They play the role of a job portal satisfying the demand for exceptional talent in the market. Right from day one when you put your auspicious leg into the campus, the only point of discussion would be placements and placements only (or sometimes about the disappointing sex ratio). You are thrown into a blind rat race where your CV writing skills is more likely to fetch you a job than your actual credentials.

An IIM student's first 1.5 semesters are lost in summer placements and that is 25% of his/her entire time at an IIM! What's the deal with this summer internship anyway? Who in their right minds would force a person with 4+ work experience to do this summer internship? Summer internships were introduced in the previous century when majority of the students who join IIMs were freshers. But this isn't the case now.  The tradition still continues..

If anyone asks you for the definition of "randomness", you could safely point to the summer placement process (or you could point to lottery tickets as well. but well yeah..). A student is just one semester old before he/she faces the placement process for internship. What could have one possibly learnt in this short span of time to prove oneself through a placement process that could very well be a reality show in itself? Naturally, the companies fall back on your pre-MBA (in)experience and obsolete academic performances to hire you in the summer placements. Can't blame the companies, can you? During my summer placements, I saw a interview shortlist that had names starting only with 'A'!. I made a note that I would name my kid starting with 'AA' to give him/her an alphabetical advantage.

The final placements take away the last 1.5 semesters. At least the final placements are not as random as the summer internship. People are more focused on what they want to do. However, the lack of attractive job opportunities and the hesitancy to settle for a low paying job in spite of a good profile (MBA doesn't teach you to take the risk, it just teaches how to hedge it!) leaves people in the less preferred jobs on most occasions. The lateral placements (for the experienced ones) are the only ones that makes sense and goes about in a calm way. If undergrad engineering colleges can conduct a multi-week placement process that helps students making a better decision, I don't understand why IIMs are hell bent on doing it in less than a week.

Amidst all this, a bunch of students do remarkably in academics. Sadly though, most of them do it for better shortlists in placements and only a handful do it out of their love for the academic content.

The administration should take part of the blame. They still conduct written examinations for courses like "Advanced Oral Communications"!(seriously, come on!) You want to evaluate the future managers based on their writing skills? But sometimes they do try their best to inculcate education,  but it is us, the students, who excuse ourselves from the academics citing "there are more important things than marks".  Students try to negotiate with professors to change the project deadlines so that they can prepare their CVs in time! We "bash" (rhythmic pun intended for IIML students) the professors who really try teach us something and want us to learn the hard way.

The sad part is that most of this mess is self-inflicted. Students want it to be this way. On all IIMs, the placement process is run by the students. I pity those bunch of students who dedicate their 2 years of college life as a part of the placement committee and helping the entire batch to get jobs. They don't deserve it, really!. They do much more than what the entire college administration does and that alone speaks for the failure of the system in entirety. Before I retire (and that's 30 years from now), I want to see atleast one IIM abolishing placements in campus. (prior to joining IIM, I had applied for an international school and I was ridiculed at when I asked "how are the placements in your college?". Apparently, they had no placement committee/cell to get the students placed. Students find their own jobs and almost 100% of them do it all the time).

For a start, at least, the IIMs should try to do away with the summer placements and make the students focus on learning something. Make summers optional for whoever wants to do it and let the students find their own summer trainee jobs. For those who are not doing summer internships, academic research projects coupled with live experiences (as deemed by the professors) should be made mandatory. All reputable companies will anyways come to the final placements because an IIM student is much more important to them than the other way around. I do agree that summer internship give valuable insights into the industries, but I believe that the same can be achieved through insightful academic projects in association with the industries.

On a bigger picture (and digressing from the above discussion), the system doesn't help creating value in the society. When I mean "system", I include students, profs, administration and the government. In other words, Entrepreneurship is not something that you'll hear more often at IIMs. Yes, each IIM would have a committee that does something towards entrepreneurship, but these setups are juvenile to say the least. Moreover, you can't just expect that students will pursue entrepreneurship on their own. The college should open avenues to support them. The students all pay in excess of 10 lakhs to complete their education and they need stable income after graduation to be debt-free.

Why not have IIM education subsidized similar to IIT? Lowering the education cost for the most talented minds in the country could help create value in the long run. MBA students (in particular) should be given the air of security so that can create value by creating jobs rather than just bagging one in the campus placements. A smaller fee to pay now for a bigger return to the nation at a later point of time.