Thread by @gauravsabnis

Nailed it

https://twitter.com/Vibhavbhave/status/1499585990112989349

And I see this in action. Every faculty meeting, there is talk of growth achieved and growth being further targeted. Top 100 colleges brag more about student body size than acceptance rates. The latter are used more for internal assessment than marketing.

https://twitter.com/Vibhavbhave/status/1499585990112989349?t=EPbnHCBMpUXOAKCdsBiofg&s=19

Why American universities don't market themselves to students based on low acceptance rates is like marketing 101. It makes sense to stress the opposite. Look HOW MANY students get in! You can too! Apply apply, we will reply.

Whereas IIMs, first talk is acceptance rates.

The 1-2% acceptance rate of IIMs doesn't signal quality but rather a lack of quality supply. There is nothing in an MBA that needs this kind of winnowing. You actually want to raise the acceptance rate if you want a developed economy. Not guard em like a goose guarding its poop.

As a beneficiary of the system, I can tell you that IIMs are more about getting spoonfed a high paying job whilst picking up some jargon in class rooms and eating maggi at 3 AM. The professors are generally quite good. And try their best. They aren't engineering type despots.

I loved most of my professors in IIML. With the exception of a few kooks and burnouts, they were all great teachers. Who genuinely cared about educating, not grading. I'm still in touch with them all.

But the truth is, it was still a secondary thing for us all. Always is.

One of my first lecture speeches to my students is "I'm not here to grade you. I'm here to educate you. If you choose to receive that education, grades will automatically follow. You have to be REALLY committed to ignorance to not get a good grade in my course, lol."

In IIMs, it is not there profs obsessed with the GPA. Multiple profs used to tell us, they've seen 4/10 cgpa's go on to become CEOs and 9/10 cgpa's never rise above middle management.

It was us, the 🤑🤑🤑 job hunters, who used it for score keeping and hierarchy building.

When you have 1-2% acceptance rates, it follows by just simple statistics and common sense, that there isn't really much of a difference within the student body in terms of abilities.

But IIMs are job contests. How do we decide who goes day 0 if everyone is cognitively similar?

CGPA of course. As soon as you arrive, we were told that the biggest prize are these day 0 jobs in these awesomely brilliant world changing companies like Lehman Bros, Bear Sterns, HSBC investment banking, all of which in 2022 sounds extra stupid.

The moment you step foot in an IIM, you are told the hierarchy and the top prizes. Wall street, consulting is best. Tech, marketing, anything with a quant bias is cool. HR and OR are cute. Public sector banks and Infrastructure companies are worst.

Now go, fight each other.

This is, to be fair, not that different from American MBA programs in terms of the hierarchy or prestige of jobs. What is different in the US system is that it is not some random cgpa number or some random placecom reality show that then decides who gets what.

In US, when wall street goes to Wharton or Harvard or Stevens for recruiting, they directly talk to students. In multiple steps. The placement office just provides logistics. There is no secretive committee of mostly privileged males deciding who gets to even interview with whom.

Long time followers will know that I decided in the first year of my MBA itself that of all these high paying fancy looking jobs put on display for me in this very expensive residential job agency, what appealed to me the most was the professor, not the CEO. 😁

Lucky me.

Once I had decided that I don't really want wall street, consulting, CEO, riding trucks to sell cola, etc, my 2nd year in MBA became all about actual education.

Also the first time I ever experienced the "elective" concept. I was a fan. Still am.

I only teach electives 😁.

You know why teaching a college elective course is the best job? It's elective!! It's right there in the word! Every single student in my class has generally made a conscious decision to take my class, not just be handed a schedule and told you have to take this class.

In my MBA 2nd yr, I took the most awesome perspective changing electives, like leadership and business ethics and quantitative methods in telecom and transport and suchlike. Well meaning friends would ask, what is your elective choosing strategy exactly? It's all over the place!

I was getting peer pressure for me choosing 2nd year electives based on how much fun I would have in the class, than with getting me a day 0 interview call.
"You get quant, you can get a 2 crore job if you focus"

I didn't want to focus! I wanted to learn!

That 2nd year at IIM, when most people are miserable and running after CG and placements and all, I was having a great time learning stuff in classes that I electively elected to get into.
No surprise, my CGPA actually climbed in my 2nd yr! When I got a choice.

I tell my students this story as well. That whenever I actively chased a grade, is when I often fell short. All my A's and B+'s came in courses where I was so sure I would do well, that I just focused on learning, not the exams and grades.

That is real education, not CAT/JEE.

First year at IIML, when I was getting pulled in different directions in the rat race, I was so miserable. A lot of the classes seemed completely useless to me, because I was just being told to focus on one "dream" job. That's literally a formal concept in IIMs. "Dream" job.

Second year, I had the epiphany that I don't want to be Jack Welch or Vindi Banga or Vinod Khosla or Warren Buffett. I want to be Avinash Mulky.

So best to just learn from the most interesting professors. Cg-vg, job-shob will happen. Long term plan is PhD anyway.

I stopped chasing a job. Just took chill courses. Blogged a lot, hehe, as compulsively as I tweet now. Watched a LOT of cricket. Learned tennis, pool, etc, taking advantage of all the facilities usually sitting empty as students crammed. Visited Lucknow city almost everyday.

And wouldn't you know it? My grades went up above an important threshold in the placement process. Still not "day 0" or Lehman levels. And without really aggressively chasing it, I got a nice tech sales & marketing job (literally my "dream") in a small company called IBM.

Looking back, I have no regrets that I got an IBM job instead of a Lehman job.

IBM actually makes stuff. Isn't just all arbitrage and information asymmetry.

But that is the biggest different in MBA or in general business schools in India versus US.

In the US, yep, Goldman is still THE job for the bros. But everything happens organically. You learn what you want to learn, you ignore what you want to ignore, you get the job you like.

Goldman or BofA in US MBA's are deciding on their own, whom to hire, by interacting directly one on one with students. Interactions spread out over months, sometimes years.

Goldman going to IIM has to defer to the usually savarna male "placecom". The ultimate middlemen.

A friend who does a lot of recruiting from IITs and IIMs told me how every campus placement thing reminds her of Lord of the Flies.
"Placecom is Jack, non brahmin students and women are Piggy"
Such a great analogy.
IIM placements are very much Lord of the flies.

My undergrad students in the US are so shocked to hear that undergrad education in India,
a. Is a year shorter for humanities than engineering
b. Forces you to "declare your major" at age 17/18
c. Has no real concept of "elective" courses. Not like us anyway.

It's barbaric.

It is insane how early India tries to lock people to a profession. And again, can't help but see the casteism influence. We love putting people into boxes.

The US university system is not perfect by any means. But there is a collective self-awareness and acknowledgment of the inequality in the system and genuine efforts to address it.

In India, whatever little self-awareness existed, is being stomped out by privileged sanghis.

I remember the morning after Trump won, my class had a presentation by a group that had a hijabi woman, a Hispanic student, a Chinese-American student, and a couple of white students working together.

Trump, for all his flaws, didn't want hijabi women kicked out of college.

I don't think privileged desis realize just how horribly bad this whole hijab bigotry in Karnataka is. Beyond the pale. As someone who has had hijabi women as students, and has some literally right now, it is extra infuriating. This bigotry in 2022.
So cruel and evil.

I've been teaching for like 15 years straight now. Nothing about my job is influenced at all in any way by whether a woman covers her hair or not.

At all.

At all!

I'm an educator. I'm telling you, this hijab thing is pure evil bigotry. No educational justification whatsoever.

If you have even the slightest bit of conscience, speak up loudly and angrily about the so called #HijabRow in India.

Hindus, especially privileged Hindus, need to be the loudest voices in telling India how absolutely fucking batshit insane and un-Indian it is to oppose hijab.

I'm extra pissed off at this hijab thing, because seriously, how evil is it to deny education to someone for any reason? And the reason is that they cover their hair?

Nah.

The reason clearly is that they are Muslim.

Sanghis want to restrict Muslims from education.

Please explain to me how this is okay.

Please tell me what possible benefit comes to the supposed "Hindu rashtra" by denying education to Muslim women.

Are these not evil people? Why do they care what someone does with their hair?

https://twitter.com/MogalAadil/status/1499664136652820480?t=NfSurF7-x42YwPCKpnludQ&s=19