IIM aspirants will not have to wait for a Graduation Degree anymore as IIM Indore has launched a Integrated 5 year Post Graduate Diploma in Management with the eligibility for the same being Class 12th. It will be a 3 year degree program followed by Masters Program and the students would have the option of dropping out after completing the 3 year degree program.

This new course introduced by IIM Indore comes at a time when cut-off percentages in SRCC are touching 100% and the even the cream of students are not able to get admissions into the colleges of their choice. IIM Indore is the 1st college amongst all the IIM’s to have launched a degree course.

The 1st batch of IIM-Indore scheduled will have 120 seats with the degree course designed to be a mix of essential skill subjects – mathematics and statistics, history, literature and political science, biological sciences, launguages, finance and accounting, economics and Information Technology. Apart from classroom lectures, IIM-Indore has a component on international exposure and an internship program at a social organization.

The minimum eligibility is 60% in Class XII & Class X, and final selection will be based on an aptitude test and interview. The tuition fee for the first three years will be Rs 3 lakh per annum; for next two years, it will be Rs 5 lakh a year. That makes it Rs 9 Lakh for the Degree Course and Rs. 19 Lakhs for the whole 5 year Management Program.

“IIM Indore wants to have a dominating presence, both in terms of size and impact, in all segments of management education, including under-graduate programmes,” said IIM-Indore director N Ravichandran. “We identified four streams — top-end research programmes, executive education programme, the flagship post-graduate programme and an integrated PGP where we’ll have the time and opportunity to shape young minds towards management education.”

Every IIM grad will tell you that a faculty or two would have at some point of time said IIMs are not good at baby-sitting. For years, IIMs stood by that line — they forayed into developing special programmes for corporates and running courses for executives. With the Indore institute bucking the trend, many other IIM directors felt the image of management schools would take a beating.

Ravichandran doesn’t agree. “I don’t think the new programme will dilute the brand value of IIMs, particularly IIM-Indore. I think it will strengthen it. Nobel laureates in the West teach undergraduate students and we won’t compromise on quality of any of our programmes,” he said. “I feel IIMs have to invest in young minds.”