The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) — the technical and management education regulator — on Tuesday said the Government or private universities will no longer be able to offer both PGDM and MBA courses simultaneously and will have to choose either of the two.
The AICTE, under the HRD Ministry, said Post Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM) courses can be run by standalone institutions, which are neither universities nor affiliated to any university, similar to the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs).
“Over a period of time, deemed to be universities have added PGDM course under the banner of ‘Management Programme’ in contravention of norms. According to the AICTE Regulations, 2020, conducting PGDM and MBA courses in the same institution is not permissible,” a senior AICTE official said.
“Central, State and private universities and institutions deemed to be universities, which are running PGDM and MBA courses under the banner of management programme, are requested to convert all courses into MBA completely and comply with the AICTE norms,” he added.
According to the regulations, institutions affiliated to universities have the option of either converting all PGDM courses into corresponding MBA courses with respective university affiliation or vice-versa and run those under a separate standalone institute. The new Government rule is aimed at protecting students from misleading claims.
There are a total of 3,000 institutes offering MBA programmes through universities, or deemed to universities or autonomous institutions and a total of about 350 of them are offering PGDM course with most of them having a combined offer for both the courses simultaneously.
“Conducting PGDM and MBA courses in the same institution is not permissible… central/state/private universities and institutions deemed to be universities which are running PGDM programme concurrently with MBA under the banner of management programme are requested to convert PGDM courses as MBA completely and comply with the AICTE norms forthwith,” says the AICTE circular following a Council meet last week.
“An institute cannot run both PGDM & MBA programmes simultaneously,” the circular added. As senior AICTE officials said the move is also aimed at eliminating the confusion caused by institutes running Master’s as well as diploma programmes.
According to AICTE chairman Anil Sahasrabuddhe, the institutes offering a good MBA would at times also introduce a diploma course in management and that the diploma course was often inferior in quality.
“In that case students would sign up under the impression that an institute offering a good MBA course would excel at PGDM as well. A lot of confusion was caused by institutes running both programmes simultaneously and thus we are now doing a course correction which benefits the Business programmes,” Sahasrabuddhe added.