title: Enhancing Enrolment and Financial Viability of a Business School - An Action Research Intervention
Creators: name: Chandrasekharan, Krishna Kumar
Publisher: name: University of Liverpool Repository
Year: 2022

description: Abstract India opened its doors to globalization in the 1990’s. When multinational companies expanded their operations in India, they realized that there was dearth of trained manpower in the country. The government encouraged the private sector to start business schools that could provide adequate number of managers to the industry. A large number of business schools started operations to offer postgraduate programmes in management. Today, these schools have a capacity to enrol over 560,000 students every year. The state of Kerala in India too approved over 100 institutions to offer postgraduate programmes in management. Unfortunately, there are only about 6000 applicants, on an average, each year for the 9000 seats offered by various business schools in Kerala. Asian School of Business (ASB) in Trivandrum, Kerala, is one such school that struggled for over ten years to get adequate enrolments. The researcher joined this institution as a member of the faculty five years ago. Along with teaching assignments, the responsibility to increase the enrolment numbers was given to the researcher. The researcher and his colleagues created an action research team to understand the problems, to help the institution to get the required number of students and to improve the delivery of the programme. This thesis is a description of the journey of this team over five years, where they analyzed activities, implemented them, observed the results, reflected individually and in groups and made modifications to the plans. As a team, the research group had to build the brand, ASB and get students interested in the management programme. To achieve this result, the team looked at the situation from the customer’s perspective based on the 4 A’s framework of Sheth &amp; Sisodia (2019). To get a deeper insight into the decision-making process of the customers, forty interviews were conducted with students, parents and other stakeholders. The transcripts of these interviews were analyzed for its content that generated over 500 codes. The codes were grouped to categories and to themes. During the analysis, most of these themes could be mapped to the elements of the 4 A’s framework. Over the five action research cycles, the team improved each A of the framework. Finally, ASB and its programme scored well on all 4 A’s in the fourth year. During that year ASB managed to get the desired enrolment of 60 students for the first time in the history of ASB. The performance was repeated the next year that helped ASB to generate cash profits, again for the first time. The modified and expanded 4 A’s framework helped the research team to build and market the brand ASB to the satisfaction of customers. This is definitely new knowledge in the context of Kerala since no literature exists about MBA choices of students and brand building of business schools in Kerala. As there are a very large number of business schools in the state that suffer from poor enrolments, this framework may also support them in identifying the areas that need improvement and help them to move towards success.