Part I
If you are good enough to qualify from amongst the 90,000-odd competitors for the pool of 1,000 seats in all the IIMs, it seems you can choose your high-paying job, anywhere in the world.

But is this fairy-tale-like situation real? Why are foreign companies keen on hiring talent from the IIMs? Are they really offering the IIM grads the world's best managerial jobs? Or, as happens most often in the IT industry, are they hiring them to function as cheap labour doing low-skill jobs?

"We have skills comparable to the best in Harvard or Wharton, that's why they are picking us up," says Samanth Dutta, 26,who has been hired by the Deloitte Consulting Group for their American practice.

"Of course, they all get stress-laced jobs which need sound analytical skills," huffs a visibly indignant Praveen Kumar Choudhary, external relations secretary of IIM-Calcutta. "In consultancies like MMG, they perform strategic roles which require them to look into the whole industry, have the right perspective, use lots of data to substantiate the recommendations given to the clients. Companies like Lehman Brothers, who are one of the best investment banks in the world, require highly skilled personnel for their operation. They must be knowing in and out of the whole financial fundas. Lehman Brothers and Mitchell Madison Group hired a total of seven of our graduates, paying them $130,000 annually."

"If I were to find that I had been hired to do a low-skill job, then I would quit immediately," said Shashank Raghuvir Kothi, 25, president of the IIM-B students' council, who picked up a job with J P Morgan at a salary he had not yet been told. "Besides, there is no such thing as cheap or expensive consultancy: whatever any of these premier companies offer had better be good."

"The type of job that I am supposed to do, I can be assured of getting fired if either my skill levels or my knowledge levels are found to be wanting," says Rajnil Mallik, one of the seven students hired as an associate by MMG for their New York office. "The IIM curriculum undergoes constant review. Irrelevant courses are dropped, meaningful ones are added, and so emerge as the world's best talent, really. Second, I guess success of Indian talent abroad has shown that we are some of the most intelligent and hardworking people. I am not surprised that the world has finally woken up and is taking notice. However, I am aware that there are some jobs offered by US companies which look at India solely due to the incongruous labour markets in the two countries. I am sure that these jobs offer correspondingly lower salaries."

Experienced management consultants and an analysis of management consulting firm recruiting at Wharton also indicate that Mitchell Madison or MMG could be better classified as a third-tier consulting firm.

McKinsey, BCG and Bain make up the first tier. Andersen Strategic Services, Monitor, Booz Allen, Mercer, etc, make up the second tier. MMG comes way down in the list.

Salary and reputation are inversely proportional (the big-name firms pay the least because when you have McKinsey or BCG or Bain on your resume after you quit consulting, it goes a long way.) McKinsey hired 61 people out of Wharton, and Bain and BCG hired 23 each (Bain and BCG are about a third of McKinsey's size, so the ratio makes sense). MMG hired three or less.

The top consulting package would be $190K (including the sign on bonus) plus the annual bonus (which can be about 30 per cent). A first-year investment banker on Wall Street would make well upwards of $200K (including their bonus that is typically the main component of their compensation). Obviously, Indian management graduates are not getting the cream of the jobs.

So are the jobs these young people are picking up really the hottest in the world? "What are the hottest job opportunities for a new MBA grad from Wharton or HBS or the Stanford?" asks Srikant Gokulnatha, an engineer from India who did his master's degree from Wharton, worked for a while for BCG and is now with a dot-com company.

"They are not Goldman Sachs or BCG or McKinsey or Morgan Stanley (as the case was three years ago). It is the no-name dot-com Internet start-up with a great business idea and ten employees and with venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia or Benchmark or Mayfield. They are the up-and-coming post-IPO technology companies that have the leaders, the vision, the technology and the drive to change the status quo."

Interestingly, the fad of joining start-ups has hit the IIMs too, but in a small way, and only in those cases where all other factors, like dollar salaries, stock options and jobs in the US, are equal.

IT start-up Fatwire of the US hired 10 students from IIM-Lucknow to work in the field of technology, quality assurance and business development. "I opted for the IT start-up Fatwire in the US after careful deliberations about the whole lot of companies that come to our campus," says Amitabh Nandan of IIM-Lucknow, originally from Patna. "It was not an impulsive decision. Start-ups were very high on my list because of the opportunity and learning they provide."

But many students who join companies like Fatwire seem to be joining as Web and software developers, not in the management stream, which makes one wonder whether the IIMs are just another route to going abroad to do software development.

"I always wanted to work for a start-up," says Rajdeep Dua, who joined Fatwire with Nandan. "Fatwire was my dream company. In my first job, I was looking for a job with a lot of responsibility and job content. Money was important but not the first criteria. I am to be based in New York as a software developer. I opted for the IT company because I love working in Web technology and there is hardly any difference between theory and practice."

In general, though (and you can look to magazines like the Industry Standard for more insight on this), management consulting firms are having a harder time recruiting at the elite US business schools. McKinsey, BCG and Goldman Sachs will always attract the best but things are rougher for the rest. In fact business schools are finding it harder to hang on to their students who often quit in the middle of their studies to start their own businesses. The eventual graduates increasingly tend to either join dot.com companies or start their own ventures, so US companies are now willing to be more unorthodox in searching for talent. In terms of opportunities and financial rewards, it is much more attractive for top tier US MBAs to work in the high-tech Internet world.

The compensation levels are often different for Indian MBAs and US MBAs. For instance, MBAs in the US get hired as consultants, MBAs in India tend to get hired as senior associates which is a level below. This is more a reflection of experience (the US business schools require a lot more experience when you apply) rather than anything else. Top tier management consulting firms such as McKinsey and BCG have extremely high standards that are non-negotiable so the hires from India are capable of performing at the same level as any of their peers from outside of India, once they get equivalent business exposure.

Some more questions surface:

• Is this now a new form of the brain drain that India is experiencing, with IIM graduates mostly opting for jobs overseas?
• Should something be done to retain them in India?
• Should these IIM grads help their alma mater to become self-sustaining institutes?
• How long can the government continue to financially support these institutes which, like the IITs, have become 'exporters' of highly trained manpower?