It is glut season of MBA courses. Both Gujarat University and Gujarat Technological University have introduced ‘cool sounding’ courses in a bid to resuscitate their ailing Masters in Business Administration programme.
Last year, more than 2,000 MBA seats remained vacant in GTU-affiliated colleges. This year, the number is likely to go further up as new colleges have affiliated themselves with GTU.
Recently, GU introduced a two-year MBA programme in financial services, port management, shipping management, coastal resource management and creative science. Apart from these, it has also started diploma programmes in financial management, human resource management, retail management, hospital management, risk and hedge management, and agriculture management to name a few.
GU Vice Chancellor Parimal Trivedi said a makeover of the MBA programme was imminent because the old, traditional courses are “outdated” and “not enough” in a highly competitive marketplace.
“We wanted to cater to the burgeoning new industries and plug the demand-supply gap. Also, these new courses are likely to be more popular than the existing ones and should lead to good placements and impressive pay packages, too,” said Trivedi.
While the reasoning sounds impressive, a course vaguely named MBA in creative science doesn’t give one an inkling that it is for media aspirants.
Even GTU revamped its existing MBA programme in human resources, marketing, finance and information systems management and incorporated a partial choice-based credit system. It also introduced new specialisations – international business management, banking and insurance, rural management, Asian business, and sustainable global businesses.
The idea behind restructuring GTU’s MBA courses was to enhance the conceptual knowledge of students and develop their working skills such that they meet the requirements of industries not only in Gujarat, but across the world, says GTU Vice Chancellor Akshai Aggarwal. He is, however, unsure how well these courses would fare.
“Last year, over 2,000 seats were vacant in our colleges. This year, the numbers may increase further as we have more colleges under GTU. Though we have introduced new courses after extensive research and deliberation, we haven’t been successful enough in promoting them,” said Aggarwal.
