4 out of 10 students in this year’s IIM-C batch non-engineers, more than a 3rd women
Times of India | 16 July 2024
KOLKATA: In a dramatic swing in admission trend, 200 out of 479 (42%) students who have secured a place in the two-year flagship MBA programme at Indian Institute of Management Calcutta this year are non-engineers.
This is a nine-fold jump from 2014, when only 22 of 462 students who secured admission in the programme were from non-engineering streams.
The country's oldest IIM has also scored high in gender parity, with more than a third of this year's batch being women.
While the IIM-C management has been making conscious efforts to improve academic diversity for the past few years, this year's intake of students from non-engineering streams is striking. Even last year, the figure was significantly lower with only 111 of the 480 students admitted being non-engineers.
Enrolment of women, too, has jumped to 36% (173 of 479 students) this year from 25% (115 of 462 students) in 2014. In 2023 and 2022, the number of women students was 137 and 149 respectively.
The institute gives special points at entry stage to women, transgenders and non-engineers to ensure gender and academic diversity.
"The admission committee has always been aware of the problem and has taken several small steps to address the situation. I am happy that more women and non-engineers have been enrolled this year. But we have to work to ensure a 50-50 balance in respect of gender and academic diversity," said director-in-charge Saibal Chattopadhyay.
Alumni association chairman G M Kapur termed it as an outstanding achievement for the institute.
"The rise in non-engineers and female students may be due to the diversification of academic choices. A decade ago, engineering was the undergraduate degree of choice but today it is not the case among students. They have many options and select courses based on their interests and capabilities like film studies, hotel management, media studies, legal studies and also aspire to study MBA from these fields," Kapur said, sharing that during his time in 1971-73, there was only one female student in his batch.
Calcutta University Business Management department head Sharmistha Banerjee said it was truly encouraging that measures were being taken to ensure gender and academic diversity.
"It has been accepted that women as managers are good performers and there is a huge demand for women managers in the corporate world. In fact, irrespective of gender, students from different fields like psychology, law are pursuing MBA as there are good placement offers and attractive salaries. Moreover, it is important that in a classroom there are students from different disciplines as this helps in building different perspectives."