Why B-school salaries hit a standstill

After years of steady growth, India's top B-schools – including IIMs – face stagnant, falling median salaries as AI layoffs, cautious hiring, and market slowdown reshape campus recruitment

- Musab Qazi

India's top B-schools, where the ever-fattening placement packages have been the norm, are confronting an unprecedented stagnancy in campus hirings.

As the uncertainty in global markets continues following the pandemic, thanks to more cautious investments and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven layoffs in the tech sector, employers are making fewer offers than usual. This has meant that the salaries for graduates are not rising at their usual pace, including at the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs).

With AI also eliminating some of the regular jobs, the companies are increasingly also looking for fewer, more strategic roles, with candidates expected to straddle tech tools with the more traditional managerial duties. However, it has also led to the creation of some new opportunities in emerging sectors of e-commerce and fintech.

Median salaries

The inflection point in the B-schools' placement story was the academic year 2023-24. This was when, for the first time in many years, they saw their median salaries, a key barometer of the placement drive's success and, more problematically, a measure of the institute's worth, have come to standstill, or worse dropped down.

The numbers from the recent and past iterations of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) lay bare the clear deviation in the placement trend lines in 2023-24, the latest academic session for which nationwide data is available. For the past several years, most of the top B-schools in the country - public and private - have boasted a steady swelling of placement packages, with median salaries rising by a few lakh rupees every hiring cycle.