A Multi-Criteria Decision Making Approach for ranking Business Schools

Introduction

In response to the growing need for management institutes in India, the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) has established fourteen business schools (B-Schools) in two batches after the primary six older B-Schools. Recently, the Government of India has passed the IIM bill¹ which declares all the B-Schools established by Government of India as institutions of national importance. The B-Schools are continuously providing quality management educations to create future managers and global leaders. While the B-Schools strive themselves to achieve excellence in terms of teaching and research, the MHRD through its National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) ranks all the national institutes based on various factors. These factors are teaching, learning & resources, research and professional practice, graduation outcomes, outreach and inclusivity, and perception. In addition to the NIRF ranking, there are numerous researches where institutions are ranked in terms of certain factors. For example, Sahoo et al. (2017) have ranked institutes according to the research output.

Till the last decade, there were only six B-Schools which made it easier for a student to select an institute. The proliferation of management institutes along with the establishment of new B-Schools has created confusion among students while choosing the management institutes because of a plethora of options. In this scenario, choosing an institute with similar attributes is challenging for a student. In addition to this, there are several organizations including public and private, which ranks the management institutes on different parameters. Students tend to assess all the parameters relevant to them and based on those parameters they take decisions to join a management institute. Therefore, it is essential to understand the parameters important for students while selecting an institution. To address the aforementioned challenges, this paper proposes a ranking framework based on the criteria the student consider significant for selecting a management institute. In addition to the advantage to the students, the framework also would benefit the management institute to focus on the critical parameters to improve the rank.

This study is conducted in three steps. First, a qualitative survey is conducted to explore the factors important for students while taking a decision to join an institute. Second, the factors from step 1 are weighed to understand the importance of each factor on the students’ decision to select an institution. Finally, the institutes are ranked based on the criteria and their weights from the first and second step respectively. The paper has used NVivo software to identify the important factors from the qualitative survey in step 1. Fuzzy analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and evaluation based on distance from average solution (EDAS) are used for step 2 and 3, respectively.

The organization of the article is as follows: Section 2 draws the literature on the background of the B-Schools and factors important for choosing a management institute. Section 3 explains the methodology used in the paper in detail. Section 4 explains the results followed by discussions and implications in section 5. Finally, section 6 presents the conclusion, limitations, and future scope for research.