Here is What IIM-A professors have to say about the recent fee-hike and academic autonomy. It is an old document, 4 years old, but issues remain as relevant as they were back in 2003-04. That said, I think they should post an updated version with most recent data available.
I browsed the position paper and i think the Profs have done a poor job. Their students would have done a much better job if this was assigned as a 15% assignment in their MANAC (Managerial Analysis and Communication) course. It appears to be a Committees’ report.
IIM-A professors consider a family earning $150,000/year in 2003-04 as a low-income family and then proceed to claim fair and stable representation of the low income group (~ 20% of all PGP students) in their student body over the two decades from 1983-84 to 2003-2004 in spite of a 50-fold (yes fifty-fold!!) increase in the fees. A family earning Rs. 150,000/annum is a low-income family in a country where 75% of the populations lives below $2/day!!! Do IIM-profs live in India?
Another interesting piece of information that strengthens the case for a fee-hike is the exponential rise in starting salaries of IIM-A grads. It was only Rs. 24,000/year in 1983-84; went up to Rs. 93,000 in 1993-94 and then crossed the million mark to reach 11,15,000 in 2003-04. There was four-fold increase in starting salaries over 1980s and a ten-fold increase over the next decade. That says something about the rising demand for management skills in India.
Sadly, we do not have data on faculties’ earnings in the report. As of now, the salary of a senior IIM-A professor is Rs. 25,000/month or Rs. 300,000/year. This, i think is abysmally low. Too low to attract top talent to teaching. Some would argue that management teachers can and do make a lot of money from consultancy. I think even that does not justify such low salaries. Good teachers are essential to building high performance knowledge institutions and in todays time we cannot attract the best to teaching if we pay such meagre salaries. Professor’s salary needs to go up too. This may be less of an issue for a top institution like IIM-A who can still attract the best due to their brand-value but it is critical for second-tier institutions. We need a good number of second-tier academic institutions too.
