IITs Placements: IITs build consensus on not declaring top pay packages in placement report

On January 4, IIT-Bombay announced that the first phase of placements, which concluded on December 20 last year, saw a total of 1,340 offers. It said there were 85 offers of annual salary packages surpassing Rs 1 crore, marking a significant increase from the 25 such offers made last year. The average annual salary package also increased from Rs 23.26 lakh to Rs 24.02 lakh.

The AIPC meeting was held a day after the announcement. The AIPC has heads of career development or training and placement cells of all 23 IITs as members, who meet at regular intervals to share their recruitment experiences and problems.

The IIT-Bombay report is learnt to have sparked criticism and discussion at the AIPC meeting regarding the potential impact that the disclosure of highest salary figures could have on students, raising concerns about the false expectations it may create among parents, especially in a year marked by overall subdued hiring sentiment, partly driven by the tech slowdown.

However, IIT-Bombay is not the only institute that discloses highest salary packages. This year, for instance, IIT-Kharagpur disclosed that 20 students were offered packages of Rs 80 lakh and above in the first phase of placement.

When contacted, Professor Debjani Mitra of IIT ISM Dhanbad, who is also the chairperson of AIPC this year, declined to comment on specific questions regarding the discussion pertaining to IIT-Bombay’s placement data. She, however, confirmed that there was a consensus on not disclosing the highest salary packages.

“The discussion on bringing guidelines on how to declare placement reports has been under consideration for a while now. I happened to be the convenor of the meeting where a consensus was taken not to disclose highest packages. An offer letter is a confidential document between the company and the student. The CTCs (cost-to-company package) are hardly verifiable,” she said.

At the next meeting of AIPC, which will be held in February, the IITs are expected to agree upon common guidelines for release of placement reports.

“Majority of these (crore-worth) offers are international offers, and people often forget that while looking at the figures. This can negatively affect students’ mental health, so we requested IIT-Bombay, and other IITs too, to not share any information on CTC in the public domain. This is very personal information that should stay between the candidate and the employer,” said another AIPC member.

Sameer Jadhav, faculty advisor to IIT-Bombay’s placement committee, told The Indian Express that he agreed with the general sentiment against disclosure of top salary packages.

“We have to remember that these are outliers. About 20 to 30 students (out of the hundreds who sit for placement) get such offers. This creates a very skewed perspective of what IITs can deliver and gives rise to unrealistic expectations among students and their parents. Students feel a lot of pressure during campus recruitment and we (IITs) are trying to see if disclosing just the mean and median salaries is the best approach,” he said.

Regretting the error regarding the earlier announcement of 85 offers of Rs 1 crore-plus packages, he said: “There was a technical error in the SQL query that ran about salary. Due to this, some of the companies got mentioned two-three times. Actually, there are 22 offers with salary packages which are Rs 1crore and above.”

In its corrigendum on Wednesday, IIT-Bombay said that of the 22 offers, three were domestic while the rest were for jobs abroad. Jadhav said of the international offers, most were for positions in European countries where the cost of living is high.