A number of business schools have flourished in the country in recent times. The aim of this paper is to determine the various factors that a final year engineering student would like to consider in order to decide on a business school for higher education. A questionnaire survey of 101 final year engineering students in three engineering colleges of Hyderabad was conducted. The factors found to be important were: Placements, academic facilities, personal comfort zone, reputation, and image. Further, a cluster analysis was performed to divide the respondents on the basis of demographic profiles. This analysis revealed that the respondents could be divided into clusters where differences could be observed between income, family size, place of residence and sex. The cluster analysis would also help business schools to target specific customer segments.

With the onset of liberalization, there has been a growing demand for business managers. This has resulted in students and working executives getting interested in management education. This has led to the growth of a large number of management institutes in the country. Moreover, the government funding has reduced drastically and this has resulted in making the programs more expensive. Students have become more careful in choosing the Business Schools in these changed circumstances. As a result, only those institutes which are geared to meet the new demanding situations and the expectations of the students will survive.

Engineers form a substantial percentage of management students in a large majority of Business Schools. After completion of four/five years of study in engineering, the students realize that rising up the corporate ladder will be relatively easy if they can add a management degree to their portfolio. The earliest works that contributed in the area of marketing of universities is by Kramp and Heinlein (1981). They wanted to identify the prospective student market and the factors that led them to choose a particular college/university. They adopted a methodology of interviewing and questionnaire survey and analyzed the data with the help of factor analysis.

Management Research Journal, Business Schools, Cluster Analysis, Liberalization, Corporate Ladder, Data Analysis, Data Interpretation, Computer Sciences, Covariance matrix, correlation matrix, Executive Development Programs, Principal Component Analysis, Industry Association.