Any good institute requires a judicious mix of full-time and part-time faculty members. The full-time faculty team provides the continuity and monitoring that is needed over the two-year period. This team also provides any hand-holding required by the students of the institute. The part-time faculty team gives the students much needed external exposure, contacts in industry and access to real time projects.

The faculty team at many of the management institutes in the lower rungs of this list is not of very good quality. The problem that these  institutes face is that at the remuneration levels they are able to offer, they are unable to attract  the best academic talent - either for part-time or for full time-time faculty positions. The full- time faculty team, therefore, lacks the required ability to provide a sound theoretical base. The  part-time faculty team is often unable to devote the necessary time and effort to the task of  training the students at these institutes. As in the case of placements, the best way of finding out about the quality of the faculty team at an institute is to speak to the seniors who are studying at the institute. Most students are fairly forthcoming about how good or bad the faculty members at their institute are. Needless to say, if the faculty quality is poor, the quality of inputs that the students get will also be poor.

Quality of students

The best institutes always attract the best students. In fact, the best institutes in the country are that way probably because they attract the very best of talent in terms of students w ho apply to them for admission. If an institute is able to attract the best students to apply/join their institute, it probably means that it is a good institute.

The better the institute is, the more difficult it is to get admission into it. The easier it is to get admission to an institute, the higher the chance that the institute is not worth getting into. This also means that the competition for admission into the top institutes is always going to be extremely stiff. Candidates would need to prepare thoroughly and systematically to improve their chances.

The quality of students makes a very big difference primarily because a substantial part of the learning at a management institute is on account of the interaction that a student has with his colleagues. A good part of the learning process involves group work including a large number of group projects. This necessarily means that if the other students at the institute are of a high calibre, then the learning process is that much richer.