Fore School Of Management

FORE School of Management shortlists for its flagship PGDM at 80 percentile, and the students who actually took a seat in the 2025-27 batch had a median percentile of 86.85. Both numbers are published, in two separate documents, and the distance between them is what an applicant is really up against. Three others decide the choice: a flat Rs 23,24,000 fee across all four two-year diplomas, a filed median salary of Rs 15,52,000 for the most recent graduating year, and no hostel on the campus at all.

FORE School of Management is the business school of the Foundation for Organisational Research and Education, a society registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860 on 30 November 1981 and running the school in New Delhi since 1992. It occupies a building called Adhitam Kendra at B-18 in the Qutub Institutional Area, and its own filing describes it as a self-financed private institute with no affiliating university standing behind it. Dr Subir Verma, a fellow of IIM Ahmedabad with 35 years of teaching and research behind him, directs it.

The award itself is a Post Graduate Diploma in Management, and the institute attaches an administrative condition to it that catches people late: the disclosure records that a student must register on the Academic Bank of Credit portal to be eligible for the diploma once the programme ends. FORE closes the gap between that wording and the MBA an employer may be asking for through the Association of Indian Universities, which recognises the PGDM and its international business, financial management and analytics variants as equivalent to an MBA. Unlike an AICTE approval, that equivalence is issued per programme and expires, so it is a line to check by date rather than to assume.

Two things carrying the FORE name confuse applicants, and they confuse them in opposite directions. The society has opened separate verticals, among them the FORE Academy of Management Education, which teaches undergraduate BBA, BCA, B.Com (Hons.) and B.Sc. programmes; that academy teaches school leavers and is not the postgraduate institute described here. Pointing the other way, FORE School of Management runs its own off-campus at Plot No. 47, Sector-32, Gurugram, so a FORE classroom outside Delhi is still this institute rather than a franchise of it.

The choice at FORE is really a choice of specialisation, because four of its five AICTE-approved programmes are the same two-year diploma pointed in different directions. The mandatory disclosure lists the general PGDM alongside the International Business, Financial Management and Big Data Analytics versions, all full-time over two years, plus a Fellow Programme in Management over four.

Geography is the catch in that table, and FORE's two statements of it do not agree. The analytics diploma's own admission page says the PGDM (BDA) programme is offered exclusively at the Gurugram Campus, while the disclosure sanctions 60 of its 120 seats at New Delhi and 60 at Gurugram. Anyone holding an analytics offer should get the teaching campus confirmed in writing before paying, because Sector 32 is not the South Delhi address on the letterhead.

Pricing is the simplest part of the decision, because specialisation costs nothing extra. One figure covers all four two-year diplomas, and the only thing that moves it is who signs the cheque.

That registration line is not a rounding item, and its parts are worth knowing because two of them come back. It breaks into Rs 5,000 of refundable security deposit, Rs 3,000 of refundable library security, Rs 5,000 for medical insurance with personal accident cover for two years, Rs 2,500 for a two-year journal subscription and Rs 7,500 of student activity charges. The programme fee itself covers tuition, examination, library, books and reading material, IT services and a complimentary International Immersion Programme, and it covers no accommodation whatsoever.

Two more diplomas open in September 2026 and are not in the disclosure yet. A two-year PGDM in Hospital and Health Management is priced at Rs 23.24 lakh, non-residential, matching the established diplomas, while the 18-month PGDM for working professionals runs to 96 credits across four terms on Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday evenings for Rs 11.5 lakh. Foreign and NRI candidates pay on a separate sheet: US$36,000 for any of the four diplomas, US$300 to register and US$50 to apply for one programme.

The Fellow Programme reverses the arithmetic. A full-time scholar under 45 is eligible for an institute fellowship of Rs 56,550 a month including 30% house rent allowance for the first two years and Rs 68,250 a month in the third and fourth, against an admission fee of Rs 50,000 and an alumni fee of Rs 15,000, so the doctoral route is paid rather than bought.

FORE runs no entrance test of its own and reads three. An applicant must sit CAT 2025 or XAT 2026, or hold a valid GMAT score, and must hold a bachelor's degree of at least three years after 10+2 with a minimum of 50% in aggregate. Final-year students may apply if they can produce the graduation proof by 1 October 2026.

A GMAT candidate has a date to settle before anything else, because FORE states the test window twice and states it differently. The eligibility paragraph on the admissions page closes it on 31 May 2026, while the FAQ further down that same page closes it on 31 January 2026, and the 2025-26 brochure also says a test taken between 1 January 2024 and 31 January 2026. Two of the three statements say January, so plan on January and ask the admissions office in writing before counting on the later date.

Selection is short and interview-heavy. The institute shortlists on the CAT, XAT or GMAT score, calls shortlisted candidates to a personal interview, and makes the final offer on the entrance score, interview performance, academic record and work experience together. Prepare wider than that, though. FORE's own two descriptions of the day are not identical: the admissions page names the interview alone, while the brochure describes written assessments and group discussions as well, with interviews run by FSM faculty alongside industry professionals.

One form covers up to four programmes, which changes how a candidate should apply. The application fee is Rs 1,500 for one programme, Rs 2,000 for two, Rs 2,500 for three and Rs 3,000 for four, before 18% GST, and those rates apply only when the programmes are chosen together in the same form. Adding a second diploma later costs the full separate fee, so a candidate who is genuinely open between the general PGDM and the finance or international business diploma should say so on day one.

The calendar for the 2026-28 batch is published in full. The form opened in the first week of October 2025, shortlisting on exam scores fell in the second week of January 2026, the selection process ran in the third week of January and through February, the merit list was set for the third week of March 2026, fee payment for offer acceptance from the first week of April, and session commencement from June 2026, marked tentative. Two administrative lines sit under that timetable, and the first is the one worth reading twice: FORE states that there are no management quota seats and that vacant seats are filled as per the AICTE calendar. Withdrawals are refunded on the AICTE policy rather than an institute-written one.

Most schools publish one percentile or none. FORE publishes two, in separate documents, and they answer different questions. The first is the qualifying bar that gets an application looked at, filed with the mandatory disclosure, and it has barely moved in three admission cycles.

Those CAT figures are identical to what the institute filed for 2023 and 2024, so the shortlisting bar is stable and predictable. The only movement across three years was on the other two tests: the GMAT bar for the flagship PGDM fell from 650 in 2023 to 600 in 2024 and 2025, and the XAT bar for the analytics diploma dipped to 50.00 in 2024 before returning to 60.00.

The second number is the one that describes the competition, because it covers students who were actually admitted rather than merely called.

Set the two tables side by side and the practical bar appears. A candidate at exactly the 80 percentile qualifying mark for the flagship PGDM sits below the 86.85 median of the students who got in, which means half the admitted batch was well clear of the published cut-off. The analytics diploma is the softest entry on percentile alone, qualifying at 60.00 and admitting at a median of 74.75, and it is also the one whose teaching campus FORE describes two ways. Since the final offer weighs the interview, academics and work experience alongside the score, a percentile in the low 80s is a shortlist rather than a seat.

The auditable placement record here is the one FORE files with the government's ranking framework, because it counts graduates and placements rather than offers, and it runs three years deep.

Read the middle column first. In each of those three years the institute placed almost every student who graduated on time, 387 of 389, then 365 of 365, then 366 of 370, which is as close to a full-batch placement as a filing of this kind can show. The median rose in each of the three years too, and the most recent figure of Rs 15,52,000 sits at roughly two-thirds of the Rs 23,24,000 programme fee. That ratio is a way of sizing the fee against the outcome, not a repayment schedule, since the filed figure is cost to company for a first year and rent in Delhi comes out of it first.

An average and a highest package exist too, but not in the filing. FORE answers the disclosure's question on minimum, maximum and average salary by pointing to the year-wise placement reports on its placements page instead of entering the figures, and those reports are published as designed graphics. Anyone quoting a headline package for this school is reading one of those posters, not a filed number, which is why the median above is the sturdier thing to plan against.

The recruiter list is long and skews to banking, technology and consulting. FORE names ICICI Bank, HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, HSBC, Standard Chartered, JPMorganChase, Bank of America, Deloitte India, EY, PwC Acceleration Centers, Kroll, Protiviti, Capgemini, Cognizant, HCL Technologies, LTIMindtree, Tech Mahindra, Kyndryl, ITC Ltd., Asian Paints, Maruti Suzuki India Limited, Tata Motors, TVS Motor Company, KIA India and Zomato among the companies in its 2025-2026 placement statistics. A student choosing the finance diploma is choosing that BFSI column, and it is the deepest one on the page.

FORE files its sanctioned strength twice over, once as a total and once split between New Delhi and the Gurugram off-campus, and the second version is the one an applicant needs, because a seat in the same diploma can sit in either city.

Three qualifications belong next to that table. Nothing in the filing breaks the strength down by reservation category, so a candidate hoping to read an SC, ST, OBC or EWS quota off this institute will not find one, and FORE says why in a single line: seats are not allotted to any specific entrance test and all are filled on merit from CAT, XAT or GMAT scores. The international lines run two different ways and the difference is worth reading, because only one of them takes a seat off an Indian applicant: NRI and NRI-sponsored candidates are fitted within 5% of the approved intake, while foreign nationals, overseas citizens of India and children of Indian workers in Gulf countries get 15% supernumerary seats over and above the approved intake for each course. And the approved strength has been running ahead of demand: FORE reported 480 sanctioned places in academic years 2022-23 and 2023-24, and 381 students admitted in 2022-23, a shortfall of roughly a fifth in that year.

The student body those seats produce is 861 across all years of the two-year programmes, 555 men and 306 women, with 304 from within Delhi and 557 from outside the state. Roughly two students in three arrive from outside Delhi, which is why FORE's accommodation arrangement matters more here than it would at a school whose intake lives in the city.

Management is the only NIRF table FORE appears in, which is what a single-discipline institute should expect. Rank 59 on an overall score of 52.23 is the whole of its government record, and the five parameters behind that one number disagree with each other violently, running from the low 80s to single figures.

Three of the five are worth taking one at a time. Graduation outcomes at 82.22 is comfortably the best of them, and it is assembled from the same completion and placement counts the institute files in its own NIRF submission, so nothing in the table quarrels with the placement record. The research parameter drags in the opposite direction for a reason the institute documents itself: it filed 14 full-time doctoral students and zero doctoral graduations across 2021-22, 2022-23 and 2023-24, and a Fellow Programme approved for 10 seats cannot generate much published output. Perception is the real anchor. At 9.36 out of 100 it is the lowest of the five by a distance, well under the 25.90 of the next weakest. It is polled from academics, employers and the public, and a single-digit result there is the distance between what FORE does with a batch and how far the name itself has carried.

Private rankers place FORE higher, and the institute quotes them on its own affiliations page rather than linking the rankers: third among top private B-schools in the north region and eighteenth among top B-schools in India by BW Businessworld, and twenty-eighth overall by MBA Universe in 2025. Those are its own restatements of somebody else's table, which is a weaker record than the government row above and should be treated as such.

FORE has no departments. A professor here belongs to an academic area, and the institute names nine of them: Economics and Business Policy, Finance and Accounting, Information Systems, International Business, Marketing, Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource, Operations Management and Decision Sciences, Communication, and Strategy. Nobody is attached to a diploma, which is why the same person turns up in front of the general PGDM and the specialised ones in a single term.

Alongside those areas sit five centres that carry the research and consultancy work: the Center for Sustainable Development, the Center for Human Capital Development, the Center for Research and Innovation in Frugal Technology Management, the Center for Digital, Social and Human Transformation, and the Innovation Incubation Centre, each headed by a faculty member rather than by an administrator. So the honest way to compare FORE's four diplomas is by the areas they draw electives from, and on that reading PGDM (FM) is Finance and Accounting, PGDM (BDA) is Information Systems, and PGDM (IB) is International Business, each pulling from a bench the general PGDM also uses.

Everything at FORE happens on one urban plot, and the disclosure measures it room by room in square metres rather than describing it. The teaching estate is 20 rooms typed as class or tutorial rooms, numbered CR3 to CR22 behind a computer centre and a language laboratory, the three largest of them at 142.29 square metres each. Around those sit a library and reading room of 421.7 square metres, an auditorium of 231.3 square metres, a seminar hall of 155.5 square metres, a cafeteria of 271.55 square metres and separate common rooms for men and women. Nobody should arrive expecting acreage.

What sits inside those rooms is what the fee is actually buying. The library holds 15,638 reference books, more than 28,200 e-books, 3,618 e-journals and 76 print journals, with access to 13 online databases including Eikon-Refinitiv, Passport-Euromonitor, CMIE Prowess and India-Stat.com, plus Web of Science, Scopus, NVivo, MAXQDA and Turnitin. Its own library page adds seating for over 120 readers and subscriptions to 11 national newspapers. The computing side runs an artificial intelligence lab of more than 300 machines with four Bloomberg terminals, on campus-wide Wi-Fi at 1,500 Mbps.

The spending behind that is filed rather than claimed. FORE reported capital expenditure on books, journals and e-resources of Rs 1,31,16,321 in 2023-24, up from Rs 1,21,71,106 the year before, which is a real and rising library budget for a school of about 861 students.

This is the fact most likely to change an applicant's budget, and FORE states it without hedging: the institute has no hostel facility of its own. It coordinates instead with a private operator, Kalka Hospitality, in buildings at Adhchini about 1.5 kilometres from the campus, one for men and two for women.

Add the room to the budget line by line. A student sharing a room pays Rs 1,95,000 in each of the two years on top of the programme fee, and single occupancy takes that to Rs 3,10,000 a year, before maintenance of Rs 400 a month and electricity at Rs 10 a unit on actual consumption. The rooms are air-conditioned with attached toilets, a mess, RO drinking water and laundry, and Wi-Fi is charged on top. With 557 of 861 students coming from outside Delhi, this is the majority case rather than an edge case.

FORE files a separate teaching load for each diploma instead of one institute-wide average, and that decision is what makes its faculty data worth reading.

Three of those four sit in a normal band for a private business school. The finance diploma does not: at 1:40 it carries more than double the load of the general PGDM on the same fee, and a candidate choosing PGDM (FM) for the Bloomberg lab should ask the admissions office how that ratio is being staffed for the incoming batch.

Headcounts are looser than the ratios, and FORE publishes more than one. The faculty page puts the core faculty at almost 86, the 2025-26 brochure says the institute houses over 74 faculty members, and the roster filed for NIRF 2025 runs to 60 named entries carrying a qualification, an experience figure in months and joining and leaving dates for each person. Only the third can be checked person by person, and it is the document to open if one professor is the reason for the application. Above the areas sit three deans, Prof. Sriparna Basu for academics, Prof. Anil Kumar Singh for corporate relations, placements and alumni, and Prof. Sachin Kumar for research.

FORE publishes its alumni with the batch year attached, which makes the list checkable rather than decorative. Its admissions page names Namrata Bhattacharya of the 1994-96 batch, a managing director at Accenture, Anuj Khosla and Mukul Jain of the 1998-00 batch, chief executive of Hitachi Payment Services and executive vice president and head of technology at Tata AIA Life Insurance, Puneet Bajwa of the 2002-04 batch, regional head for the north at YES BANK, and Nitin Jain of the 2004-06 batch, a managing director at Protiviti.

The wider list in the brochure runs to the same sectors. It names Sanjiv Bajaj, joint chairman and managing director of Bajaj Capital, Swarup Mohanty, vice chairman and chief executive of Mirae Asset Investment Managers India, Ravindra S. Negi, managing director and chief executive of Orient Electric, and Kush Mehra, president and chief business officer of Pine Labs, against a network the institute puts at more than 8,000 alumni across 169 countries. Banking, financial services and consumer businesses dominate that roll, and they are the same sectors the placement page leads with, so the network and the recruiter list point in one direction rather than two.

The accreditation clock is the news that actually changes an applicant's position here, and two of FORE's own pages currently disagree on it. The recognitions page states that the PGDM, PGDM (IB) and PGDM (BDA) are accredited by the National Board of Accreditation till 31 December 2028, and the PGDM (FM) till 30 June 2026, while the mandatory disclosure updated on 4 December 2025 still shows the older windows, with the PGDM and PGDM (IB) running to 30 June 2025. The recognitions page is the newer statement, and the finance diploma's renewal in mid-2026 is the date to watch.

Two other dated items are worth tracking. The South Asian Quality Assurance System accreditation runs for five years to September 2028, and the AIU equivalence has been renewed programme by programme, with approvals for the PGDM and PGDM (IB) running from July 2025 to June 2028 and for the PGDM (FM) and PGDM (BDA) from July 2024 to June 2028. Both matter to a 2026-28 student who will graduate inside those windows.

FORE sits in the most crowded stretch of the NIRF management table, where a rank means very little. In NIRF 2025, NIT Tiruchirappalli and Christ University tie at rank 57 on 52.47, FORE follows at 59 on 52.23, Banaras Hindu University at 60 on 52.14 and Birla Institute of Management Technology at Greater Noida at 61 on 52.09. Under half a point separates those five institutions, so a candidate comparing FORE with BIMTECH on rank alone is reading noise.

The comparison that carries weight is the Delhi NCR ladder. The same table places Management Development Institute at Gurugram at rank 9, the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade at 17, IMT Ghaziabad at 30, IMI Delhi at 40, Jaipuria Institute of Management at Noida at 41 and Great Lakes at Gurgaon at 50 above FORE at 59. IMI Delhi is the sharpest reference point of those, because it is a private PGDM school of similar shape with an address in the same institutional area, and it scores 56.59 against FORE's 52.23. That is a real gap rather than a rounding difference, so a candidate holding both offers is trading rank against the things the table cannot show, the fee, the specialisation on offer and which campus the diploma is actually taught on.

One building at B-18 carries the whole institute and a second address in Sector-32 carries the off-campus, each with its own switchboard, and FORE lists the deans and the two offices an applicant actually needs separately from the general line.

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