Enhancing Enrolment and Financial Viability of a Business School - An Action Research Intervention
Krishna Kumar Chandrasekharan
2022
India opened its doors to globalization in the 1990's. When multinational companies expanded their operations in India, they realized that there was dearth of trained manpower in the country. The government encouraged the private sector to start business schools that could provide adequate number of managers to the industry. A large number of business schools started operations to offer postgraduate programmes in management. Today, these schools have a capacity to enrol over 560,000 students
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... ry year. The state of Kerala in India too approved over 100 institutions to offer postgraduate programmes in management. Unfortunately, there are only about 6000 applicants, on an average, each year for the 9000 seats offered by various business schools in Kerala. Asian School of Business (ASB) in Trivandrum, Kerala, is one such school that struggled for over ten years to get adequate enrolments. The researcher joined this institution as a member of the faculty five years ago. Along with teaching assignments, the responsibility to increase the enrolment numbers was given to the researcher. The researcher and his colleagues created an action research team to understand the problems, to help the institution to get the required number of students and to improve the delivery of the programme. This thesis is a description of the journey of this team over five years, where they analyzed activities, implemented them, observed the results, reflected individually and in groups and made modifications to the plans. As a team, the research group had to build the brand, ASB and get students interested in the management programme. To achieve this result, the team looked at the situation from the customer's perspective based on the 4 A's framework of Sheth & Sisodia (2019). To get a deeper insight into the decision-making process of the customers, forty interviews were conducted with students, parents and other stakeholders. The transcripts of these interviews were analyzed for its content that generated over 500 codes. The [...]
doi:10.17638/03154628
fatcat:qtgd644cu5czhfjifve2govi74