Lets not be crabs in the barrel, and let smart people earn their pay.

Actually, a lot of those kinds of salaries are laterals i.e. people who already have a significant amount of experience in corporate life before they come into b-school. Nonetheless, that is a serious chunk of change.

Thank you for the detailed response, the kicker to IIM salaries is that most of the high paying positions are in London/HK and U.S

Just a couple of side points – all the IITs have Departments of Management and Business – including BHU-IT and Roorkee and even the IISc at Bangalore, but perhaps excluding Guwahati (I don’t know). Some of them, such as IIT-Bombay and IIT-Kharagpur, also have fully branded Business Schools. The IIT engineering curriculum, in its core and electives, does include business courses, as well as Humanities, as well it should. No problem there.

As people well know, when engineers grow in mainline technical careers, they can branch off into sales engineering or technical management, which can call for some specialized training, and both of which add a lot of economic value. I fully support the idea of those tracks.

I hope this hasn’t gotten too far off topic. Thanks.

Actually, Floridian, the argument is that the introduction of the Wall Street culture without withdrawing the subsidy to the IIT education is like being a little bit pregnant. If the subsidy was withdrawn, while at the same time, a free market which demanded technical talent also arose, then this distortion should not arise. Some IIT engineers in this situation may go into finance, and that should even out, except if the financial sector, though the entry of Wall Street firms with deep pockets, became extraordinarily strong, and was able to pay above market salaries, etc. The distortion with the subsidy is not limited to “misunderutilizing” the IIT graduate, there a number of horizontal and downstream effects as well. This is the crux of the matter that KXB has raised. As you will agree, there is a real economy, which produces goods and consumables, and a financial economy, which ideally should intermediate between capital suppliers and capital demanders, pocketing an intermediary’s fee. However, in practice, the financial sector has a lot of power, and the question is whether it should be stronger, and by how much?

Thank you for the good words, and I do recognize the economic value of advertising, no disrespect was meant to that sector in general!

Are we wishing for just a little bit of manipulative power over a market driven economy? Remember, Chachaji, one cannot be a little bit pregnant.

Knowing how diligently you apply yourself to issues, I am sincerely interested in your views about the economic value of advertising, essentially a free market industry that brings some very smart people together for a very specific purpose – sell more soap.

ans: It should be as prominent as it is in the US and Germany. The answer is that it is second only to the government in importance to a country’s economy.

the reason for India’s “developing country” status is a long history of misgovernance and bad investments. All in the hands of the sarkari babu. If you think about it, allocating a country’s budget efficiently is the biggest investment challenge of all and should be based on a sound financial principle, ie ROI – return on investment. The private banking industry does it better than politically motivated ministers.