IIT placement rates slide, pays shrink as vaunted colleges reconcile with AI, changing job market

The overall placement rates of BTech graduates at the 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) fell from over 90% to just around 80% between 2021-22 and 2023-24, with the weighted average annual salaries reducing marginally from ₹23.45 lakh to ₹22.7 lakh, an HT analysis shows, with IIT administrators and faculty attributing the trend to an uncertain job market and high student expectations, although they insist that the overall placement scenario in the IITs is stable.

- Sanjay Maurya

The IITs are yet to release a consolidated report of their 2024-25 placement season.

The seven IITs established between 1951 and 2001— Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras, Kanpur, Delhi, Guwahati, and Roorkee—are classified as first generation IITs, and were the worst affected in terms of placement rates, seeing a dip of over 11 percentage points — from just above 90% in 2021-22 to 79% in 2023-24 — though their weighted average salaries (average pay adjusted for the number of students placed) saw only a marginal dip of ₹0.2 lakh, from ₹25.5 LPA to ₹25.3 LPA.

The eight second generation IITs set up during 2008-09 — Bhubaneswar, Gandhinagar, Hyderabad, Patna, Ropar, Jodhpur, Indore, and Mandi — recorded the steepest salary decline of about 2.2 lakh, from around 22.2 LPA to nearly 20 LPA, along with a 9 percentage point drop in placement rates, from above 93% to 84%.

The eight third generation IITs (including those converted into IITs) (BHU) Varanasi,(ISM) Dhanbad, Palakkad, Tirupati, Bhilai, Goa, Jammu, and Dharwad saw a 7.3 percentage point fall in placement rates, from about 87.8% to 80.5%, and a salary decline of 1 lakh, from 19.6 LPA to 18.6 LPA.

Only eight of the IITs, including three first generation ones, saw fewer companies participating in placements.