IIMs and Financial Times MBA Rankings

I recently had an interesting conversation regarding why supposedly the best business schools of India - IIMs do not figure anywhere in the global Top-100 MBA rankings. I said - IIMs would perhaps not figure in global rankings unless they change the system. Here are the reasons I think it might be difficult for IIMs to crack the global rankings -

- The admission process itself is messed up to some extent with reservations, and there is no doubt that admission process is an important factor in the rankings
- IIMs do not accept GMAT, which means that the students can not be benchmarked against students from other global schools
- Also, the average work experience in IIMs is 1-2 years (as compared to 4-5 years in other global schools)
- This also leads to lower salaries post MBA which brings IIM down in rankings (although while calculating the rankings they usually just take the % difference in before and after salaries, but I think a more inexperienced class of IIMs will have an impact on final rankings)

Personally, I believe that IIM students have excellent analytical horsepower and intelligence in. However, they can work more on enhancing their soft skills, and IIMs can definitely steer the students in the right direction. I believe that to be a successful in the corporate world, at the end of the day, soft skills matter more than hard skills. - maybe a 60% to 40% distribution.

By the way, FT rankings are also skewed for some parameters, like salary differences pre and post MBA etc. and some institutes do stand to benefit from it. I personally take all the rankings with a pich of salt - "Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital."