Is it good to do an MBA from a tier-3 college?

Hi...
I asked this to someone who attended a tier-3 MBA Maharashtra. Here's the response

My experience has largely been "good" but not "great".

Pro's:

Infrastructure & facilities are pretty good

Faculty is decent, with some really good guest lecturers

Really good events. Opportunity to meet famous personalities & entrepreneurs

Helped me with personality development

Gave me a solid foundation in business knowledge

Con's:

Student crowd not up to the mark

Most were there because they didn't get a job, parents asked them to, or because they wanted to pursue civil services and didn't want to sit at home

Very few were passionate about "learning"

College too focused on their events (brand marketing). Event mgmt done by students (obviously) was utter chaos.

College too focused on just getting students placed. A LOT of students ended up in jobs they didn't like or on career paths that they didn't want to go.

Really vague advice e.g. if you were good in math go into "finance" or if you were remotely presentable then go into sales etc

To sum it up, if you are indeed self-driven, a tier-3 college in India isn't necessarily bad in terms of getting a "degree". However it is not going to add anything substantial to your resume.

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Keep in mind that this is just one students perspective.

Make sure you connect with others who are attending the target schools you have in mind, to get a more realistic picture.

Let me know with an upvote if you found this response useful.

Good luck!

To answer this question, we first need to define a tier-3 B-School. In my opinion, the rule of thumb would be that any MBA college which refuses itself to be scrutinized based on data on its quality of teaching and learning outcomes is a tier-3 MBA college. I would set the following four parameters for defining a tier-3 B-School. Any MBA college or B-School that is

i)               Not NBA accredited

ii)              Not having any international accreditations

iii)            Doesn’t participate in NIRF rankings nor figures in those rankings.

iv)             Doesn’t participate in credible rankings such as done by Careers360 which rank only based on data and information and have set up a transparent process.

If we are to go by this, of the 3500+ MBA Colleges or B-Schools that we have in India, not more than 600 should be in your consideration set.

i)               we have about 401 MBA colleges that are accredited by the NBA.

ii)              About 630 MBA colleges participating in NIRF (https://www.nirfindia.org/Home) rankings

iii)            About 450 colleges participating in Careers360 ranking

iv)             The international accredited institutions would be a handful. For example, there are only 14 AACSB accredited institutions in India.

The quality of Management Education follows the waterfall graph. We have some very fine B-Schools at the top led by the IIMs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Institutes_of_Management) , MDI, IIFT, DoMS etc. These would be about 50 to 75 in number. This is followed by those PGDM or MBA offering colleges that have been in management education and have made a name for themselves over the years in the learning outcomes and manage to have a strong industry connect that they design the curriculum well and place the students also. This outcome ensures that students from around the country come to study here. These are right fit for the 60 percentile to 80 percentile students.  These would be another 100 B-Schools. After this, we see a steep fall in the quality and the tier-2 B-Schools come up. These MBA colleges largely cater to the local needs and are aspired for by locality. Geographic diversity is almost non-existent in such B-Schools.

Given an option, I will choose to do MBA only if I get into the first two clusters which total about 15-200. However, we have to provide for all kinds of students who may not have the right scores and desire that they get a job through the campus placement process in a local B-School.

However, it doesn’t make any sense to study beyond the tier-2 colleges unless it is just to kill time and acquire a formal qualification.

The short answer to your question: I will never invest time and money to study in a tier-3 B-School or tier-3 MBA college.