Editorial: Why placement data sucks

NEW DELHI: Always a late riser, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Education has flagged an “unusual decline” in placements in IITs. Its 363rd report, presented to Parliament late last month, reported that placement of BTech grads in IITs fell over 10 percentage points comparing the academic year 2023-24 against 2021-22. Placements at IIT Madras dropped from 85.71% to 73.29% over the reporting period; and at IIT Bombay, from 96.11 to 83.39%. Other IITs and NITs across the country saw a similar trend, including a decline in placement percentage as well as leaner salary packages.

The committee, chaired by Congress MP Digvijaya Singh, recommended improved faculty development programmes and initiatives to bridge the industry-academia gap at these institutes. However, a better question the committee could have asked is: If the IITs are reporting such poor placement numbers, what’s the situation at other institutions and universities? Is it adequate to use the performance of IITs as the bellwether for the health of higher education at large, both state and private?

The truth is that placements at institutions other than IITs, NITs and the top B schools have never been the bother of governments, both state and central, or the high councils that administer institutes of higher education. Placement data for non-IIT institutions are often fragmented or unavailable, reflecting a systemic lack of monitoring by regulatory bodies like the University Grants Commission. The National Institutional Ranking Framework claims to do a ranking of all institutes of higher education, but its Graduate Outcome parameter gives weightage to passing exams rather than landing a campus placement.

This allows institutions, especially private universities, to get by on self-claimed and unaudited performance parameters. Many premier institutions in the state sector, such as Banaras Hindu University and Jamia Millia Islamia, perform well on teaching and research parameters but lack comparably robust and refereed placement mechanisms. Most of the private universities put out puffed-up placement data and obfuscate it by keeping it non-granular. The lack of access to accurate data makes it difficult for students to make informed choices about employable courses.

It’s universally acknowledged that the poor employability of graduates is the biggest problem facing higher education in India. Typically, the government deals with this as a skilling challenge, as a shortcoming in the graduates themselves. Its response is to launch initiatives such as the Prime Minister’s Internship Programme, supposedly aimed at teaching graduates in a few weeks stuff that their universities did not do for three or four years. No wonder these skilling programmes fade away after a few years of futile trying.

A more useful approach would be to acknowledge that a student goes to university mainly to get a job and hold varsities accountable for assisting him or her on that quest. Regulators like the UGC must be empowered to impose hefty fines on institutions for dressing up data or withholding access to applicants.

Clearly, the time has come to make educational institutions shoulder a lot more of the burden of employability, both by making their curriculum industry-ready and assisting their pupils in finding employment. What use are universities that cannot even assure an internship acceptance to their students? It’s time to call out institutions that puff up placement data and fail to serve their customers, the students, in finding employment.

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