“After the large downturn a few years back, there’s been a fair amount of distinction between the good business schools and the not so good ones. The people who wanted to cash in on the MBA demand have left the market.”
Still, there are nearly 4,000 business schools in the country. And many are considered second-rate. But if there’s one thing Sujit knows well, it’s the education business.
“It has become a little better now... it’s better than before,” Sujit half-concedes. He is an alumnus of IIM, Bangalore – one of the highest-tier schools, he would be quick to tell you, and of IIT, Kharagpur, where he studied electrical engineering.
His background is almost archetypal of the region. He enjoyed successful stints at Telco Systems (India's largest engineering company) and Wipro (India's most valuable IT Company) before moving to the United States to set-up operations for Dharma Systems, an upcoming software start-up.
If that wasn’t enough, he is also trying to spearhead the business he helped co-founded around 14 years ago into a new digital era. CL Educate’s success in education has made them a household name in India.
The education giant has 225 learning centres spread over 175 locations in India and is over 3000 people strong; with teachers, trainers and academics making up 65 per cent of this workforce. Sujit says they directly employ about 1,000 people – 10 per cent of which are MBA graduates.
He joined CL’s management team, which is made up of IIT-IIM alumni, in 2000, and has been the driving force behind their technology initiatives. Their marriage of technology and business in the education sector has been long and fruitful.
“I have been responsible for the development of tech for the last 15 years,” Sujit says proudly, but adds that he is also the CEO of Indus World School, one of the company’s education verticals that runs fifteen schools across India.
“It started off as a very small, very entrepreneurial start-up, which started with helping students who have qualified for the final stages of business school – the top school of India [IIM] – and trained students to get past the critical, group discussion and personal interview tests.”
The first couple of years were “very successful”, he enthuses, and many of their students were landing places on top Indian MBA programs. The business added formal classroom programs and became a fully-fledged test-prep company, and began adding a range of other subject offerings.
But our talk quickly swings back to the changing face of Indian MBA programs. “The b-schools found it difficult getting jobs for their students and demand for admissions was falling for two or three years consecutively,” recalls Sujit.
“That led to a loss of demand for us… a fairly challenging time. Things have picked up of late, but we did go through phases of low demand.”
They compensated for that loss with the other sections of their business. CL Educate offers test-prep, vocational training, K-12 Education – which differs from the conventional method of teaching and involves a more teacher-student communication – and higher education.
That balanced out the growth slow-down they saw on the MBA side. “And there were other segments, such as test-prep for law, which really started accelerating at a rapid rate,” explains Sujit.
CL Educate’s growth strategy this year will focus on their publications business, which include a raft of magazine titles, and test-prep, the company’s staple.
Sujit has high hopes. “The increased focus on hiring in the banking sector is giving our banking test-prep a boost. In a similar way, a lot of employment is being generated by government-controlled public sector units,” he says. “The test-prep related to entry points into these jobs has become very important to us.”
He continues: “The publications division always [has a] fairly healthy opportunity for growth and we plan to add many more titles related to these segments. Many students depend on books and other materials.”
But the business is not beholden to old forms of delivery, he insists. Technology, Sujit’s passion, will be one of the driving forces behind their expansion.
Last year the test-prep arm of CL Educate launched a new online program - 'Power PDP', in February. Sixty per cent of their classroom students’ services are delivered online and many programs are delivered completely online through e-learning, he says.
The topic sees his passion come to the fore. “Technology is a very, very crucial part of our delivery system and management system,” Sujit says in excitement. “We’ve given all our students [within the Indus World School arm] a tablet pre-loaded with educational content.” Mobile, he hints, will be a big part of their offering moving forward.
He is unfazed by the prospect of globalization but insists the company’s focus will be on India. Yet, part of their “global expansion” has seen them open up learning centres in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, the former very similar to India; so it’s “not really a foreign place for us, just another market”.
CL Educate has been dominating the Indian market for years. You can see why they might stay put. The opportunities in India are sufficiently large enough.
“We don’t have any specific plans other than what we have. So we will definitely grow those businesses [in Dubai and Abu Dhabi], but nothing new,” says Sujit.
There isn’t much incentive to move out of India – but Sujit wants to go much further down the technological road. “So more e-learning programs, especially mobile learning,” he says. “We will try to increase our student base by offering more programs on tech platforms.
“[We will] probably also look at ways of getting more investors, to grow the capital base so we can invest in more of these things.”
The future for CL Educate, then, lies in an online space, not a physical place.
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