CS, electrical and mechanical students get most high-paying jobs, says IIT Bombay Placement study

The study was undertaken by Namit Agrawal, Sailakshmi Sreenath, Shishir K. Jha and Anurag Mehra from the Centre for Policy Studies at IIT Bombay. It observes that students with a high CPI are eligible to apply for most companies and owing to this, the sector they get placement offers from is likely to reflect their choice.

Explaining the cluster analysis of CPI and salaries across core and non-core jobs, Mehra said, “When placements of high CPI (8-10) students from select branches were studied, it was observed that in all departments, apart from Computer Science, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, high-paying jobs were few even for high CPI scorers. This is in addition to the general observation that there is a positive correlation between CPI and salary as high CPI students are eligible to apply for most companies.”

The pattern of non-core jobs having high salaries is reflected in the study too. “We see that non-core recruiters reward higher CPI than core recruiters, but this effect is likely because of the high salaries that non-core jobs offer to CSE students,” the study says.

A comparative analysis of sectors and jobs in the categories of “high-scorers”, “medium-scorers” and “low-scores” in the study shows that non-core jobs are a dominant preference. For the years 2016, 2017 and 2018, the distribution tends to become more even handed for medium and low scorers. Data show that in most years, more than 60 per cent of students in the low and middle scorer category have preferred non-core jobs. For high-scorers on the other hand, core and non-core preference is evenly spread almost at a 50:50 ratio.

Computer Science contributes heavily to the core basket and  “its exclusion from the data skews the preference for non-core jobs even further”, says the report. Data excluding CSE shows that in most years, more than 70 per cent students from the low and middle scorer category have preferred non-core jobs. More than half of the high scorers in this category also picked non-core jobs.

“The distribution pattern indicates that Computer Science is the leader with the highest CPI. Electrical Engineering shows the widest distribution. The five departments being compared here have a similar batch strength. Further, we see only a small difference between the median CPIs across departments with all values falling between 7 and 8,” the report says.