Choosing

How to judge a provider yourself

We can tell you who is empowered to award what. Only you can judge the rest, and these are the six questions that actually separate providers.

Disclosure. We run one of the programmes described on this site — the IICT and IIPM online MBA. It is deliberately excluded from the tiers below, which are ordered by statutory standing, something we neither control nor hold ourselves. Ours is here, labelled, so you can weigh it against everything else yourself.

1. Who awards the certificate?

A university awards a degree. An affiliated college teaches while the university awards. An institute awards its own diploma. Establish this first — it decides which rule applies to everything else.

2. Was it entitled for your mode and your year?

For any degree studied online or at a distance, ask for the UGC-DEB entitlement letter naming the programme, the mode and your intake year. This is the single most important document in the process and the one least often requested.

3. What is the total fee, in writing?

Not per semester. From admission to holding the certificate, including examination, re-registration and certificate charges. How readily the answer comes tells you a great deal beyond the number.

4. How much live teaching is there, and when?

If you are paying a premium above the open-university tier, this is what you are paying for. Ask how many hours, on which days, and whether attendance is compulsory. Then ask yourself honestly whether you will attend.

5. Where are the examinations?

Online mode usually means remotely proctored exams at home. Distance mode usually means term-end exams at a centre. For anyone who travels, this decides the programme.

6. What is the maximum permitted period?

Commonly four years for a two-year MBA. Failing a paper is recoverable; running out of the maximum period is not, and it is the most common way a distance MBA ends without a degree.

Why we stop here

You will notice we do not rank teaching quality, placement or student satisfaction. There are 337 institutions in this directory and we have verified data on none of those dimensions for any of them. A site that ranks them anyway has invented the ranking, and you would be right to distrust the rest of what it tells you.