Enough B. Tech-MBAs in the country? IIMs now want non-engineering students

Indian Institutes of Management are changing the way they admit their students, and would stress more on personal interviews than their scores in Common Admission Test (CAT), so that they can increase their number of non-engineer students.

As of now, engineers account for 90-95% of MBA students in these institutes, but old IIMs including those in Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Bengaluru and Kozhikode want to steer away from this trend.

"One of the goals is to increase the diversity in the classroom without compromising on the quality of the students. Past data suggest that this goal is best served by giving relatively more weightage to personal interviews," an IIM-A spokesperson told ET in an emailed response. Earlier, the weightage given to personal interviews was 40%, which now has gone up to 50%.

"CAT is a quant-based examination biased towards people from engineering background. We want more candidates from non-engineering background and are gradually making the changes necessary in the admission process to have more diversity," said Preetam Basu, chairperson admissions at IIM Calcutta.

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