Chasing the cat

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Bangalore has a large student population which studies in various streams and institutions in the City. Then there are also youngsters working in the IT companies who have left their native states and made the City their home.

These facts were more than visible in this year’s CAT (Common Admission Test) registrations. Bangalore has 18,837 candidates taking the test in its ten test centres. But out of this, only 13,500 students have Karnataka as their home address.

Himanshu Rai, the convener of CAT 2010 mentions that this disconnect is because of the number of outsiders living in the City. “It is normal trend for the applicants to give their permanent address instead of the temporary one in the forms. And this explains the number of non-Karnataka applicants,” he says.

“Most of the people appearing for the exam are either IT professionals or students who study in the many engineering colleges of the City,” he adds.  The IT crowd forms a good number of the applicants. “From my experience, I’ve gathered that a lot of people taking CAT are working professionals, especially from the IT industry,” says Chhaya Kewalramani, a PSU professional from Nagpur. “I am sure that I will have a good chance of promotion once my profile gets better,” she adds.

But it was also observed that working professionals prefer GMAT over CAT. “Working people prefer giving GMAT instead of CAT because the cost of doing an MBA from any of the IIMs is same as doing one from B-schools abroad,” says Debajyoti Sharma, from IMS Learning Centre.

However, things are different for engineering students. “Most applicants for CAT are engineering students. There are quite a few engineering colleges in the City and all of them have students from different parts of India,” says Debajyoti Sharma of IMS Learning Centre.

“About 65-70 per cent of the students are engineering graduates,” says Thimmaiah NK of Career Launcher, a coaching institute. Surprisingly, it has also been observed that it is the non-native students who prefer taking this exam. “When it comes to the percentage of students appearing for CAT, non-native students form the majority,” says Thimmaiah N K. He mentions that students belonging to Karnataka prefer to go for MTech or go abroad for courses.

“If you check with the parents of the native students, you will find that they want their kids to be educated in technical courses and not management ones. Exposure to management, as a career, is pretty less here. Also the best B-schools are located in North India and the parents don’t want their children to go outside for either job or studies,” he adds. The exam, which started on October 27, is being conducted over 20 days till November 24.