The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) is setting up an international campus in Dubai. In fact, it has set up an office in 2018-19 to provide short courses, and realised that there is high demand for management education in this region. The Dubai campus will be a full-fledged international branch. It is recognized by the Commission for Academic Accreditation (CAA), the regulatory agency in the UAE. The campus will run MBA and MBA-like programmes.
It will commence operations by offering one-year executive MBA, and the founding batch will receive their degree in August 2026. The eligibility criteria are experienced professionals clearing GMAT/GRE. The students selected will be from the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC), from Africa, from erstwhile USSR region. The idea is to attract students from global south.
To begin with, the institute will have fly-in fly-out faculty from the parent IIMA. In about a decade, they intend to have a 900-student campus. It will have then regular local and international faculty.
The institute will use local case studies for which they will launch two research centers, one for developing local case studies, and another to incubate startups.
Both the government of India and Dubai government are providing capital expenditure support. The Dubai government will foot the capex. The institute has to focus only on operating expenses.
In a few months, the institute will be allocated land, and the civil facilities will be ready in 3-4 years.
The global business schools charge $ 1 lac plus fees for an MBA in Dubai. Smaller institutes charge $ 40000. IIMA has kept its fees at about $80000 per year. The fees are somewhere in the middle.
Already, Dubai has several Indian educational institutes — Manipal Dubai (2000), BITS Pilani (2000), SP Jain School of Global Management (2004), Amity Dubai (2011), IITM (2023), Symbiosis (2024), IITD Abu Dhabi (2024).
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