Put Harvard, MIT and Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status of IIT in India. IIT is dedicated to producing world-class chemical, electrical and computer engineers with a curriculum that may be the most rigorous in the world. Just outside the campus gates, the slums, congestion and chaos of Bombay are overwhelming. But inside, it's quiet and uncrowded and, by Indian standards, very well equipped. Getting here is the fervent dream of nearly every student. With a population of over a billion people in India, competition to get into the IITs is ferocious. Last year, 178,000 high school seniors took the entrance exam called the JEE. Just over 3,500 were accepted, or less than two percent. Compare that with Harvard, which accepts about 10 percent of its applicants.
“The IITs probably are the hardest school in the world to get into, to the best of my knowledge,” says Vinod Khosla, who got into IIT about 30 years ago. After graduating, Khosla came to the U.S., co-founded Sun Microsystems and became one of Silicon Valley's most important venture capitalists. He's one of thousands of IIT graduates who have made it big in the U.S. “Microsoft, Intel, PCs, Sun Microsystems -- you name it, I can't imagine a major area where Indian IIT engineers haven't played a leading role,” says Khosla. “And, of course, the American consumer and the American business in the end is the beneficiary of that.” It isn't just high tech. The head of the giant consulting firm McKinsey & Company is an IIT grad. So is the vice chairman of Citigroup and the former CEO of US Airways. Fortune 500 headhunters are always on the lookout for that IIT degree. “They are favored over almost anybody else. If you're a WASP walking in for a job, you wouldn't have as much pre-assigned credibility as you do if you're an engineer from IIT,” says Khosla.
