PGDM seat intake increased from 480 to 540, aspirants may face fee hike: GIM Director

In an exclusive interview with Shiskha.com, Goa Institute of Management director Dr. Ajit Parulekar talks about the b-school’s academic strategy, placement plans, upcoming collaborations and more.

Goa Institute of Management (GIM), is one of the B-School in India. Affiliated to Goa University, the management institute offers a two-year Post-Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) programme in eight different specialisations along with two other programmes which are Executive and Fellowship Programme in Management (FPM). In an exclusive interview with Shiskha.com, Goa Institute of Management director Dr Ajit Parulekar talks about the b-school’s academic strategy, placement plans, upcoming collaborations and more.

Q: From 48 to 35, Goa Institute of Management has shown quite an improvement in NIRF Rankings. Is the institute aiming for a spot among the top 10 in the coming years? What are areas you are looking to focus upon?

A: We do aim to be in the top ten and there are several measures that we are putting in place. There is an increase in our scores on all the parameters of NIRF. The place where we are giving a lot of impetus is research and contribution towards industry.

So we are recruiting top-quality faculty members. We recruited 21 new faculty members from a variety of top institutions in the country, including IIM Ahmedabad, IIT Delhi, IIM Bangalore, and other top institutions of the country, including a lot of people who had PhD. The faculty has PhD from NYU Stern, Stanford, etc. We had at least 5-6 people who worked in some of the top institutions worldwide, including faculty who are non-Indians.

Faculty who are productive in research spend less time teaching in a classroom. We tell them that you can teach as little as 60 to 90 hours in a year, provided you're going to be doing high-quality research. Research is going to be one big area where GIM is going to have a higher contribution in terms of teaching-learning processes, in terms of the programs that we run. We have already run outstanding programmes. We have specialized verticals. Our healthcare management vertical is the best in the country. Our big data analytics vertical was ranked by analytics India insight as #2 in the country, and Analytics India Magazine ranked us #4. So both these verticals are relatively recent and are among the top in the country. We just launched a banking, insurance and financial services vertical in 2020. it will have the same kind of trajectory like these two verticals in a couple of years from now.

Q: GIM has opened campus for students. Is there any change in the academic strategy of the institute?

A: 750 out of 900 students are already back on campus and by the 10th of this month, we should have 100% of students back on campus. As of today, we are doing online classes. We expect that classes will happen in offline mode in less than 15 days from now. Higher education and business education especially are suboptimal when done in online only. GIM is a fully residential diverse campus and with this kind of diversity, if students are not on campus, they won't have an opportunity of learning from the clubs, societies, classmates coming from different parts, and different cultures. With all the students being back on campus, it is going to be roughly 25% to 30% of program delivery will continue to be in an online mode and 70 to 75% will be from the classroom. We'll try to leverage the advantages of blended learning. There are certain outstanding advantages of good quality online learning management systems give. We want to keep those at the same time, there is a lot of advantage in having face-to-face interaction with classmates, with faculty, with other people on campus, lively discussions, and more. So that's what we're going to do in a blended format.

Q: GIM offers Sectoral MBA programmes. How are these received by Students and Recruiters?

A: There is now a committed group of students who apply for these sectoral programmes. Before asking, how do students see these? I think the question is how do recruiters see these? How does the industry see these? These programmes have been extremely well received by the recruiters. I'll just give an example. Last Saturday I spend the entire day working with the Governing Council of a Health Care association. This governing Council had managing directors of almost all the leading hospital chains, almost all the leading medical device companies and a lot of other companies in healthcare.  And I was invited there to attend that because of the way they see the importance of our program.

They want to recruit from this program because they realize Healthcare is a very specialized industry and we need people who have domain expertise and yet are very strong MBAs. We find the same thing happening in Data analytics. While we are not an engineering school so we don't create data scientists but for people to be managers who understand data really well, the tools, the possibilities you need People who are data fluent. Therefore our students who come out from the big data analytics programs are in a much better position to work in industries that are on the Cutting edge of using data analytics. Therefore they are better equipped than somebody who comes from a general MBA program. And we see the same thing happening for banking in the future. Banking is now being run currently by old age bankers. But today artificial intelligence, blockchain, data analytics, these are the things that are driving faceless banking. They require specialized talent. So because industry is recruiting people, GIM students from the big data analytics and the healthcare management in our programs are being recruited.  We are the best in these places, therefore they are being accepted well.

Q: What are the new courses and programmes that GIM is planning to offer in the near future?   

A: In the last 5-6 years, we've launched more programs than anybody else in the top institutions. Be it healthcare, big data, analytics, banking insurance, financial services and the fellowship program in the management software program. GIM will have some new verticals that will come in the future. I can't discuss it right now. Things are in progress. We typically take at least two years of a lot of research, talking to industry, prospective students, competition worldwide looking at curriculums before we decide on going out with a new vertical.

But the one big place that GIM is going to be working on is we think there are a lot of audiences who cannot afford on-campus education. There are homemakers who are extremely skilled and could do a lot of good to the world and they would want to do an MBA But they have to take care of so many other priorities in their life that they can't come on campus and spent two years. There are a lot of busy working executives who might be great technocrats but they need to understand management but they need to do the job that they're currently doing and they can spare a lesser time.

We'd like to use technology for such management aspirants and have a lot more blended hybrid kind of programs. Because we run a fabulous on-campus program all our blended programs will have an immersive segment, but that's the thing that we are looking at doing.

Q: Is GIM planning collaborations in the future to offer versatile online and offline courses?

A: We've been able to add a larger number of international as well as domestic collaborators. There are two main things on our partnerships. One is collaboration in terms of our students going there, or their students coming here. One big initiative that we are doing is called the ICBM, The International Consulting Bootcamp. We've been running ICBM for 20 years with one of our partners and for the last 2-3 years we expand it to four more partners. What our plan is, every single GIM student in five years from now will have an international component in their programme and the component will not be an exchange. It could be an exchange. It's going to be a component which is a consulting Bootcamp, which means let's say just a structure will be three students from GIM, three students from the international partner will work on a consulting project on a real company in that particular country. So for something like 15 days, giant students will travel to that country before that for 3-4 months online they're working with their partner students. 15 days will go there, Meet those people, meet clients, meet partners, do all of that and kind of give us work on solutions that consulting so there we think you're getting international industry exposure. You're getting international culture exposure, you're talking to students and other institutions. That's really what we're looking at.

Q: How is the institute assisting students affected due to COVID-19? Did the institute launch any scholarships for such students?

A: We didn't launch specifically for COVID, but we have a lot of scholarships. We have a scholarship for meritorious students. We have scholarships for students with means and we have a tuition fee waiver also that we do for students who have a family income of less than eight lakhs INR. What we realized some years back that students with money are able to go on international exchange. That’s not fair because students with a lot of money anyway get international exposure and therefore we decided that we will have scholarships for students on merit and who have an income issue. So, we have a 2 Lakh INR scholarship for the exchange program which covers all the main expenses for a student to fly, stay like participate in the exchange irrespective of the means. So I think we do, uh, several scholarships like that.

We have scholarships and different programs for students. We have 40 scholarships every year for students joining a PGDM program. These are for achievers. We want high achievers to join GIM. We think we must honor and recognize their achievements by giving them a scholarship. So I think every year we must be doing something like 60 or 70 scholarships and something like 20 tuition fee waivers.

Q: Will there be any increase in the number of seat intakes?

A: In 2020-2021 we launched two new programmes. New Age Banking Insurance Financial Services and a doctoral program in management. This year, there will not be any increase. So, after 11 years of our flagship PGDM program. We're increasing the intake from 240 to 300. The total number of students will be taking for all our full-time PGDM programs this year will be a little over 540 students, up from 480 last year.

Q: Will GIM aspirants face any fee hike in the upcoming admission session?

A: A fee hike is natural. A fee hike will happen if you have to get a world-class education. World-class education doesn't come cheap. We have the world's best professors in their discipline. If we want to engage them, we can't engage them on a personal favor where they'll do it free of cost.

If you want the best, you can't pay the worst, you can't pay the bare minimum. The kind of journal access that students have, the quality of the Internet. We already had a One GBPS Internet line to make sure that we have more reliability. We're trying to push the government to make private players provide more than that to 10 GBPS 100 GBPS. The quality of education depends on the quality of Internet, quality of support services, quality of learning resources.

We sign up for the Harvard Business School entire learning material.  For every student, we pay a large dollar fee per year as subscription services and if we have to do all of that, if we want the best, it is going to cost some money. We don't have any grants from anywhere. It is students who have to pay that. So every year, if we are going to increase our faculty, we're going to increase people's salaries. We are going to bring newer resources. So in line with that, we would be increasing the fee.

We try to make it affordable to our students and therefore the expected increase should be something above what inflation is going to be like. The increases will be generally between 5 to 10%. It's unlikely to be less than 5% will not even cover. Inflation is probably going to be now. It won't be more than 10%, so it should range between 5 and 10% maximum.

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