There’s an old joke about Engineers and MBAs, which goes something like this. Two young men, who have just finished college, bump into an elderly uncle at a family function. After conversation, the uncle asks the first graduate what he studied. I’m an electrical engineer from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), he says, puffing his chest in pride.
The uncle’s face lights up, and he asks him if he could come home to fix his refrigerator, which recently stopped working. The IIT kid gently demurs, and explains to the uncle that electrical engineers can’t really fix electrical appliances. The disappointed uncle then turns to the second kid and asks what he studied. I just finished my MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), comes the answer. The uncle’s face lights up again.
“That’s great!” he says, “You can help me sell a broken refrigerator!”
As Asia liberalized and its private sector exploded, the MBA program, led by the IIMs in India, became a filter of quality, as a shibboleth to identify those who were seen as sharp and ambitious enough to beat hundreds of thousands of others in an entrance exam.
Salaries skyrocketed. And as the MBAs climbed higher and higher up the tiers of India’s top corporate, they hired more people like them, making placements a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Enter the gap.
Ask professors at B-schools, and they will bemoan the fact that institutes like the IIMs have gravitated away from research and towards becoming a finishing school for ambitious students seeking a comfortable life.
On the other hand, MBA students who enter corporate will tell you how little of what they’ve been taught in B-school is applicable to making daily decisions. Marketers have veered away from conjoint analysis, and Black-Scholes models don’t really help you make sense of crypto.
Stoa School (and several others like it) sought to narrow this gap. By offering cohort-based courses online, they targeted the price tag and utility of a regular MBA. The basic idea was simple—give common sense, practical knowledge, targeting people in their early careers interested in making a switch to a high-paying startup job. And they do it through a mix of case studies, lectures, and DIY projects.
In our Today’s article Zainab is much fascinating deep dive on whether do this will work, and what it takes for institutes like Stoa to succeed—and disrupt the MBA program finally .