In the QS Executive MBA Rankings 2026 released on April 29, India’s top business schools faced a paradox – while schools like IIM Bangalore secured a ‘career outcomes’ score of 76.3 – outperforming global titans like MIT Sloan, Penn Wharton, and Chicago Booth in that specific metric – its overall rank was anchored by low ‘diversity’ scores. Just like IIM Bangalore, ISB – with campuses in Hyderabad and Mohali – ranked higher than Columbia and Copenhagen in ‘career outcomes’, but saw its ascent slowed by a lack of enough international student/faculty, and gender variety in the classroom.
What is diversity?
In QS rankings, the ‘diversity’ indicator measures the percentage of women in the cohort, and the percentage of international students and faculty. While top-10 global B-schools frequently boast international student bodies exceeding 60% and female representation nearing 40%, many Indian cohorts remain overwhelmingly domestic and male-dominated.
Does it signify failure?
A former dean of ISB told this newspaper that low diversity isn’t a reflection of academic failure, but of a demographic and structural ceiling. “In the Executive MBA (EMBA) segment, which targets mid-to-senior professionals, the applicant pool is a mirror of India’s corporate leadership – a space that still grapples with a significant gender gap,” he said. “When 80% of your applicants are Indian males, achieving a high ‘diversity’ score becomes a mathematical impossibility, regardless of the programme’s intellectual rigour.”
Getting foreign students
The challenge of internationalisation is even more complex. Prof Rishikesha T Krishnan, the former director of IIM Bangalore, previously told this newspaper that Indian B-schools were set up to educate Indians first, and that is their primary focus. He also shared a harsh reality of global education: the ‘study-to-work’ pipeline. “When a student goes to a foreign university, the aim is not just study, but finding a job and a better living environment.
It is hard to attract students from developed Western countries when the local job market and living conditions are the primary drivers of student mobility,” he said. Even regional recruitment faces hurdles. While Southeast Asia is a logical target, the region remains highly brand-conscious and often unfamiliar with the Indian ecosystem. As far as Africa is concerned, to attract them to India you need to offer them a lot of scholarships, maybe dovetailed to the foreign policy of that country.
Local versus global
The impact of this lack of student/faculty variety is significant. It creates an echo chamber effect that global ranking bodies penalise. An education analyst said that Indian B-schools are essentially victims of their own domestic success. “They have such a massive, high-quality domestic queue that there is little commercial incentive to aggressively court international students.
However, in the eyes of a global ranking algorithm, a brilliant but homogenous classroom is seen as a ‘local’ institution, not a ‘global’ one.” He added that a fundamental shift is required to break the diversity drag. “Until Indian B-schools can attract a global cohort and drastically improve gender ratios, the very top spots of international rankings will remain mathematically out of reach,” he said. “India has the excellence; now it needs the mix.”
Beyond diversity
Two other indicators have been dragging down rankings of Indian B-schools: ‘thought leadership’ and ‘employer reputation’. In these categories, institutions like Oxford and MIT Sloan consistently hit near-perfect scores of 98 or 99 or even 100, reflecting their status as global idea factories and their prestige among international recruiters. Indian B-schools are respected domestically, but their lower scores in areas like ‘thought leadership’ suggest a gap in global research impact and brand perception.