How We Did It

FORTUNE INDIA’S Best B-Schools 2024 surveyed the schools on five key elements of evaluation (KoEs) for the annual ranking — Admission Attractiveness, Age & Brand Appeal, Placement & ROI, Pedagogy & Infrastructure and Industry Connect. ‘Distance to Frontier,’ a concept most unique to Fortune India B-schools ranking, shows how far other schools are from the leading business school in the country. This is the first such benchmark for any B-schools ranking in India.

The study involves expert consultation, global perspective and KoEs. Academic leaders, such as directors and heads of renowned business schools and senior industry leaders were consulted to reconfirm the importance of key elements in evaluating the performance of B-schools. These consultations helped in utilising the key elements and their weights judiciously.

Our research partner, Ascension Centre for Research and Analytics (ACRA), conducted the survey to collect data and process the rankings during the February-September 2024 period. As part of this extensive research procedure, more than 2,000 B-schools in the country were invited to participate. All schools established at least five years ago with a minimum of three passed out batches in MBA/PGDM were eligible to participate.

The research also considered global tie-ups, international accreditations, exchange programmes for students and faculties, international placements as part of the ranking process. For all the KoEs that used three years’ data for consistency, the weights assigned were in a ratio of 50:30:20, respectively, in favour of recency. The sub-elements of evaluation (SEoE) in the KoEs were assigned weights as per expert consultation.

The study has been conducted with the help of two different survey data. The first one, Absolute Data survey, was conducted among B-schools with the help of a detailed prescribed format sent to business schools in India. Participation was sought from them to share the actual numbers on each of the relevant parameters as mentioned in the survey form. The survey asked for data for three recent years so that the business schools can be compared in a holistic manner.

A total of 205 business schools shared their data as part of the participation process. In addition to these 205 schools, the Absolute Data from 28 other B-schools, both government and private run, were evaluated as part of the ranking survey. Therefore, a total number of 233 B-schools were considered in this year’s ranking. Data for these 28 B-schools were collected from their websites as well as various government and other portals available in public domain.

The second — a Perception Survey — was conducted across 24 cities. The stakeholders participating in the Perception Survey included recruiters, final year students and faculty from business schools. The total sample size of 1,026 comprised of 315 faculty, 203 recruiters and 508 students. Final scores for the ranking were obtained after combining the scores from the Absolute Data and Perception Survey. Equal weights were used for these two survey components to arrive at the final scores.

The research also presents the ‘Distance to Frontier’ scores to fulfil the objective of measuring the distance of each school from the leading school. This highlights the standing of each school in comparison to the highest-ranking school. The ‘Distance to Frontier’ is presented in a scale of 100 to 0, where 100 represents the best performance and 0 represents the lowest performance among the business schools in the country.