New government data on campus placements of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) have reaffirmed a worrying trend in the country’s prestigious engineering colleges. For decades, IITs, especially the elite ones, were considered recession-proof. However, it has not been raining jobs for a while. Except for IIT (Banaras Hindu University), placements for BTech students saw a decline in the 22 other IITs between 2021-22 and 2023-24, according to a parliamentary standing committee report. Some of the older IITs have been given a reality check. Delhi, Bombay, Madras, and Kanpur each presided over a decline of over 10 percentage points. In 2023-24, only three (second-generation) IITs — Jodhpur, Patna, and Goa — recorded over 90% placements. The committee has also reported a similar trend in National Institutes of Technology, including a fall in the average starting salaries of graduates. The declining figures are in comparison to a pandemic year (2020-21), when there was a jump as the job market staged a brief recovery that failed to arrest the overall trend.
The dipping percentages do not point to a skill deficit, which may be the case in other sectors that pose questions on the employability of graduates. It is also true that IITs are not placement centres. In fact, the government’s own rankings of these institutes consider yardsticks such as teaching, learning, and resources, research, outreach, and perception. But for a bulk of the students, IITs are a ticket to a lucrative career and companies rely on them for hiring top talent. The committee’s observation that “there could be various reasons for this decline, like students opting for higher education or pursuing start-up ventures” is not disputed but it does not explain the issue fully. A minority of students does tend to pursue higher studies, civil services or management programmes. But the number of students signing up for the placement process has also gone up in all IITs except Tirupati. At the same time, surveys suggest the number of students who are getting jobs independently may be rising.
Campus hiring has had to contend with multiple factors in the last few years, such as a fallout of post-Covid mass recruitment in 2022, rising batch sizes, and, most importantly, a global slowdown in sectors such as technology and software. The changing market dynamics, especially driven by a disruptor like artificial intelligence, will continue to weigh on white-collar jobs as well, a fear expressed by Microsoft founder Bill Gates recently when he identified only three kinds of occupations — coders, biologists, and energy professionals — as immune from it. India’s IT sector too has shifted towards automation, which resulted in a drop in headcount at major firms in the December quarter, but they have promised a hiring spree this year. This is beyond the control of the premier institutes, which have tapped into alumni networks to help fresh graduates in their job hunt.
What they can do as urgently is update curricula in tandem with the fast-changing industry needs. This ties in with the committee’s suggestion to “find ways to enhance employability”. The government, meanwhile, should take steps to ensure its employment initiatives attract talent from IITs for technical roles. In the longer term, it should also focus on reviving interest in core engineering along with the institutes themselves seeking out manufacturing companies so that the fortunes of IIT placements do not begin and end with the tech sector alone.