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Thursday, April 06, 2006
The IIMs, and competition
Falstaff writes in regarding my post about why the IIMs should stop taking subsidies:
My basic argument is that the fact that the IIMs are heavily subsidised makes them extremely vulnerable to political control - which is only likely to do them harm (witness the MM Joshi brouhaha a while back, and stuff I'm now hearing about Arjun Singh and his plans).Falstaff had some interesting things to say on this subject in the comments of this post as well.
The need to be free of state control is even stronger when you consider that the IIMs now need to compete with private schools like ISB, that may be able to adapt faster because they're not constrained by bureaucracy (anecdotal evidence from profs in US b-schools suggests, for instance, that one of the reasons why ISB is able to attract more visiting faculty from top schools is because they're much more flexible about the terms on which such faculty can visit).
If there's ever an institution that needed to be privatised it's the IIMs - and financial independence is the first step to that. Which is not to say that I don't wholeheartedly agree with the inefficient use of tax revenue argument as well.
