“For instance, a third of the surveyed students who had majored in finance, did not know what IPO – short for initial public offering – stood for”
Last summer, we interviewed dozens of these Ivy-League B School’ dimwits for a simple financial analyst position. Our simple question of “kindly explain a profit margin ratio..” turned to: “I think profit is about greed”. “umm, profit ratio is about the ratio to make a profit”, to “this company should share it’s profits with the poor”. Yes, they were all B school grads from every known Ivy League uni you could think of.
Our headhunter was apologizing in bunches after the first 3 weeks..
Thank God for all of you! Seriously!
I think it might be important to point out that these are grads from schools in India, not Indiana or any US schools. (It's an article from the WSJ India edition)
I don't know how US B-school students would test out under the same guidelines, but given today's' US education standards, probably only marginally better.
But I do have some experience in working with Indians who have engineering degrees, and I'd say it was a positive experience on the whole with some super-stars involved in the mix and a few duds.
I'd suggest that the way their economy has been growing in India in recent years, and with a burgeoning middle class sending their kids to college instead of the rice patties, the education system has likely been overloaded.
Any enterprise, even a university, can only grow so fast and maintain quality. As the article said, they have several hundred thousand now going to college just for business degrees. Millions going to college overall.
It would be no surprise to me if the university systems there have expanded faster than their ability to deliver a quality education.
Rapid growth in demand quickly exposes weaknesses and flaws. That's in Business 101 as I learned it years ago. Growth brings new problems. Rapid growth brings big-big problems. ;~))
I guess little facts of life for financing business like EBITDA or DSCR or LTV were not for mere MBAs but maybe they were gonna cover that in Phd program?
Lol...banks would laugh at me if i didn’t know this stuff
And I’m a mere poli sci major from sometime last mid century
Woooowwww... I'm as big a critic of schooling as you'll find, and I'm shocked.
My homeschooled daughter just finished up an introductory course in accounting, and she could have answered that question. AAMOF, we were just talking about profit margin ratios the other night.
I wouldn’t consider “umm, profit ratio is about the ratio to make a profit” to be a very good answer either.