BANGALORE: The brain child of Prof H V Dinesh Prasad, a renowned statistician who wanted to bring in quality education and help students to get degrees at affordable cost, Noble School of Business (NSB) is the recipient of the prestigious Indira Priyadarshini Award for the year 2011. Prof Prasad, who is the Chairman of NSB speaks to Vyas Sivanand about the school and how their approach towards teaching is making a difference.
Tell us about the academic programs offered by NSB.
Noble School of Business offers management oriented degree courses such as Bachelor of Business Management, Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Computer Applications from Bangalore University.
Noble Evening College, started in 2011, offers B Com and B Sc Computer Science to help working executives get regular degree from Bangalore University.
Under the Post Graduation level, we offer Master of Business Administration program recognised by University of Mysore with options from ten specialisations. Besides, we also offer a two-year regular industry oriented Post Graduate Program in Management certified by NSB.
What are your future plans in terms of new courses and expansion?
NSB has been recognised as a study center to offer Distance Education Programs under the affiliation of Mahatama Gandhi University (Reg. by UGC -AICTE - DEC), Meghalaya.
This enables even the working executives to go for MBA (two years) or EMBA (one year). There are other professional and traditional courses in the offing from this university.
We are also planning to begin a Pre-University College from the coming academic year. With the growing strength of students, we may look at a bigger campus with updated resources.
What are your views on the current scenario of Business schools in the country.
Education has become commercialised in specific business schools .
In Bangalore, an MBA can cost a student anywhere between `3.5 lakh to a whopping `8 lakh depending on the brand image of the institute. So, basically the student is paying for the brand.
Apart from the fee, business schools claim to provide good placements. We may place them on their first job, but are they ready for the next?
I think the necessity is to commit ourselves to make them capable to get good placement throughout their career.
Another aspect is that business schools are taking efforts in providing additional training to the students but what they lack is real time exposure. We have to get the student out in the heat and make him/her experience how things actually work on ground and how many do not.
We, at the Noble School of Business expose our student to live projects during their course besides their dual internship. Students undergo two internships; one in Europe for 45 days, which enables them to learn from the global corporate world, and the other one in India. This helps the students in learning and differentiating between the two worlds.