Identity Crisis?

 

In the 25 years since its inception, CBS has rolled out illustrious alumni, successful entrepreneurs, and industry bigwigs through both its flagship courses Bachelor of Business Studies(BBS) and Bachelor of Finance and Investment Analysis(BFIA). Over time, it has grown to become one of the most sought after colleges of the country.

Ten months ago, I walked through the gates of this prestigious college, proud of myself for having made it through the three gruelling admission rounds. Today, this college faces an identity crisis of sorts, its patent courses threatened at the hands of a seemingly irresponsible university.

The University of Delhi has set forth a proposal to merge Bachelor of Business Studies, Bachelor of Finance and Investment Analysis and Bachelor of Business Economics, to come up with an all-inclusive 4-year long umbrella course, tentatively named Bachelor of Business Economics and Management. While the new course shall contain elements from all these three courses, these parent courses will be entirely scrapped.

The first question that must be asked here is why merge these three courses at all?

The university states the similarities in the course curriculum to be the reason behind the merger. However, it must be noted that the only common ground between these three courses is the entrance test that one must clear for admission. Beyond the entrance exam, these three courses offer education in three entirely different disciplines. BFIA is a core finance course, BBS offers general management skills, and BBE focuses on business economics. The mere idea of merging these three courses is as absurd as merging Political Science (H), History (H), and Geography (H) to create a Social Studies (H), simply because there’s too much paperwork to running three courses.

What a student wishes to study should be his prerogative, not the university’s. While even a layman can tell the difference between Finance, Management and Economics, this basic distinction seems to have evaded the minds of the people in the university, who seem bent on merging three starkly distinct courses for the sake of administrative ease.

By simple logic, would a merger between Economics(H) and Bachelor of Business Economics not make more sense? Not only are both Economics oriented courses, one is an academic course while the other is professional, and thus, the two will compliment each other perfectly well.

While the change in the duration of the course is acceptable, even welcome, it is absurd that the university has been unable to find sufficient subject matter to extend each of the courses by an year individually, without clubbing irrelevant courses together.

 

Through all these years, the thrust of the government of India has been to stress on vocational and professional courses that increase their students’ employability as much as possible.

It is appalling, then, that the University of Delhi is seeking to systematically destroy a professional course which has been so widely accepted across the corporate industry, offering its students 100% placements straight out of an undergraduate college, citing over-specialisation at the undergraduate level as the reason. Wasn’t the very purpose of courses like BBS and BFIA to provide specialised competence to their students and ready them for direct employment? Was that not what had always given the students of BBS/BFIA an edge over the students of purely academic courses like B.Com(H) and Economics(H)?

 

Its sad that in a university, administrative concerns come before academic ones. Nobody in the University of Delhi seems to care about the 800-odd students, and the many, many more alumni, who will suffer grievously as their course goes defunct. What will happen when the very credibility of their degree begins to be questioned, whether in job interviews, or in post-graduate college admissions, is nobody’s concern. Nobody seems to realise that the repercussions of this one imprudent decision hold the potential to ruin several careers.

 

It is highly unfortunate that the university plans to do this to some of the brightest minds of the country, all of whom have left behind illustrious colleges to study Bachelor of Business Studies and Bachelor of Finance and Investment Analysis.

Rash, irrational decisions by an inconsiderate university is certainly not what they deserve.