Why we grade programme types and not individual colleges
There are nearly three thousand institutions on the register. We can defend a judgement about routes. We cannot defend three thousand judgements about names.
Our sister site grades management routes — open university MBA, private university MBA, PGDM, PG diploma, mini MBA — on six weighted criteria. It does not grade named institutions, and the question we get asked most is why not.
Because we have no defensible basis for it. Grading a specific college requires data on its teaching, its outcomes and its current intake that we do not have and cannot verify at scale.
Publishing invented grades about real organisations would be dishonest, and unfair to them.
What we can say with confidence
Structural differences. An open university online MBA and a private university online MBA differ in predictable, describable ways — in what is awarded, what it costs, what teaching comes with it, and which rule applies to it. Those are gradeable.
And the commercial part, stated plainly
We are paid by institutions when a student enrols through us. That is precisely why the grades are about categories rather than about the institutions who might pay us. A grading system that could be bought would be worth nothing to you, and we would rather have the site be worth something.
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Money
The ₹2 lakh online MBA is selling you the same degree as the ₹38,000 one
Below a certain price the differences are real. Above it, you are buying teaching and a cohort — not recognition. Almost nobody says which one they are selling you.
Recognition“UGC approved” is the most misleading phrase in Indian education marketing
It is not technically false. It is just answering a different question from the one you asked.
ProductsThe mini MBA is not an MBA, and everyone selling one knows it
A twelve-week course borrowing the name of a two-year degree. Sometimes genuinely useful. Never the thing its name implies.