IIM tweaking CAT maths level won't help save Indian education
CAT results for the upcoming academic season are out, and like every year, engineers have topped the rankings. All 17 students who scored a 100 percentile in this year's CAT are engineers.
For some time now, IIMs have been making the right noises about increasing diversity on campus, but the format of the exam, which is maths-heavy, is definitively skewed in favour of engineers and, by implication, against humanities majors.
The convenor for this year's CAT, Tathagata Bandyopadhyaya of IIM-A, sought to defend the IIMs' failure to have students from other backgrounds with this rather curious assertion: "Many students with an engineering background are bent on pursuing an engineering-MBA combination and prepare accordingly. People from other backgrounds don't always take the CAT equally seriously. Also, a lot of the best students from streams such as physics, chemistry and English don't even opt for CAT."
It would be easy to decry Bandyopadhyaya's reasoning as the snobbery of the technically-minded, but my experience as a CAT trainer indicates he may not be far off the mark. And that is an outcome not so much of a preference, or lack thereof, for maths but the nature of engineering and business education in India.
Before the latest CAT which took place in November, a student walked up to me. "I have to make it this year, sir," he said, "I have to, at any cost." He passed out from IIT Delhi in 2012 and worked for a year in a financial advisory firm before leaving because the job left him no time to prepare for CAT.
CAT 2015 was his third attempt. His first attempt was during his final year at college, when he did not receive any calls. In his second attempt, he got an admission offer from Wellingkar's, a tier-II B-school in Mumbai, which he declined. "I am from IIT. Some of my seniors are working for BCG and Bain. How can I go to some nondescript MBA college?" he said.
Out of work since mid-2013, he has been preparing for CAT since. This year he is on the 97th percentile in CAT, which is not good enough to receive calls from any of the top IIMs. In the outside chance that he does get a call from, say, IIM Lucknow, he is anyway at a disadvantage in explaining to the interview panel what he has been up to these two years. Sitting at home to prepare for CAT is not the best answer, even though hundreds take such breaks every year.
In short, for my student, not going to a B-school is not even an option anymore. His story is replicated among scores of other good candidates who are just that short of making it to an IIM-A, B or C. Since they come from some of the country's top engineering schools, they'd rather work or prepare for CAT than accept admission to a good-but-not-great college.
There is also the interplay of other factors in all of this. Academic background and the right credentials (attending an English-medium school, say) put you at a distinct advantage in making it. A south Delhi kid with little preparation is much more likely to ace the CAT than one from a Bihar town who has burnt the midnight oil.
We see a plutocratic bias not just in industry and politics but in tertiary education too. But the fact is, IIMs - or an MBA degree broadly - is only one factor in a person's success. I know of an IIM Ahmedabad grad who has been thinking of starting his own restaurant for the past six years but hasn't been able to, for one reason or the other. In the meanwhile, he teaches maths at a CAT coaching centre in Delhi.
On the other hand, there is also this friend's friend who passed out of LIBA in Chennai (heard of it?) and is now a senior merchandise manager at Alshaya, the biggest retail company in West Asia.
One's career is as much about one's drive, zeal, contacts and the all-important luck as it is about one's alma mater. The point is, life isn't about crossing fixed barriers and basking in their success. Life is about constantly navigating one's options and shifting the goalposts. The grimness that defines missed opportunities is ignorant of new avenues waiting just beyond the door.
But you would be damned if you tried getting this into the mind of a just-passed engineering grad rushing headlong to crack CAT. The IIMs, in spite of their storied success, are ill-equipped to address glaring disparities in India's educational system. To try and resolve these by tweaking the level of maths asked in CAT is not just short-sighted but positively foolhardy.
A deeper, more evolved change in India's education paradigm is needed so that students don't feel beholden to making it to a few institutes in order that their careers may shine.