Management education: social costs and returns

Abstract

This paper seeks to apply cost-benefit analysis to evaluating institutions set up for imparting management education. The major conclusions of the paper are twofold: (1) Social cost-benefit analysis can be adapted to provide a useful conceptual framework for the economic evaluation of educational programmes. The nature of costs and returns is such that of all forms of education this approach seems most relevant to the evaluation of management education. (2) The results of the social cost-benefit analysis of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, attempted here show that allocation of resources for management education at the national level is justified even when judged under the most pessimistic assumptions about costs and returns.