After the placement boom, What five years of engineering data reveal about India’s top institutes, ETEducation

India’s engineering campuses have spent the past few years adjusting to a placement cycle unlike any other in recent memory.

The numbers reached a high point around 2021-22, when campus hiring rebounded strongly after the disruption of the pandemic. Since then, placement rates have come down at several of the country’s leading engineering institutions.

But the five-year record does not tell a simple story of decline.

Look only at the fall from the 2021-22 peak and the picture appears stark. Go back to 2019-20, the last pre-pandemic year in this analysis, and the picture changes. Some institutions are now placing a larger share of their graduating B.Tech students than they were then. Others are significantly below their earlier levels.

The salary numbers add another twist. Median pay has risen in nominal terms at almost every institution examined. After inflation, however, six of the ten have seen the real value of median salaries decline.

And there is a less visible problem with the headline placement percentage itself: the students being counted are not always the same.

IIT Roorkee and IIT Kanpur told ETEducation that their internal placement figures are calculated using students who register with their placement offices, rather than the full graduating cohort used in the NIRF disclosures. At IIT Kharagpur, two official NIRF filings reported different outcomes for the same 2021-22 graduating cohort. The institute said the discrepancy arose from the structure of NIRF’s reporting format and that corrective measures were subsequently taken with NIRF’s approval.

These differences do not make the data meaningless. They make it more important to understand what the percentage actually represents.

For Engineers’ Day, ETEducation examined five years of undergraduate placement, salary and graduation data disclosed by ten leading engineering institutions. The result is not a single verdict on the state of engineering jobs in India, but a picture of a placement market that surged, normalised and diverged, while the way graduate outcomes are reported remains an important part of the story.

Five years of data, and one outlier year

Engineering placement season is usually dominated by its most visible numbers: the highest package, the number of recruiters and the size of the offer pool. The five-year record disclosed to the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) tells a more complicated story.

The most striking feature of the series is the 2021-22 spike. Placement rates rose sharply that year at nine of the ten institutions examined, before moving lower over the following two years. In several cases, the movement from the peak to 2023-24 was more than 10 percentage points.

IIT Delhi, for example, moved from a placement rate of 78.6% in 2019-20 to 90.7% in 2021-22 before falling to 75.2% in 2023-24, below its pre-pandemic level.

IIT Guwahati and IIT Hyderabad show a similar pattern, with sharp increases around the 2021-22 period followed by a decline.

The pattern is consistent with a post-pandemic hiring catch-up. Recruiters that had paused or slowed hiring during the pandemic returned as campuses reopened, pushing placement rates in 2021-22 to levels that several institutions did not sustain.

IIT Madras is the notable exception. Its placement rate peaked a year earlier, at 86.4% in 2020-21, and otherwise remained within a relatively narrow range across the five years.

Its graduating cohort, meanwhile, grew by roughly 84%, from 388 students in 2019-20 to 714 in 2023-24, without a corresponding movement in the placement rate.

The comparison with 2019-20 changes the picture.

The picture changes when the pre-pandemic year is the benchmark

Comparing 2023-24 with each institution’s own 2019-20 baseline produces a very different picture from comparing everything with the 2021-22 peak.

IIT Hyderabad, IIT Kanpur and NIT Tiruchirappalli placed a higher share of their graduating cohorts in 2023-24 than in 2019-20.

At the other end, IIT Kharagpur recorded the steepest decline, falling 20.6 percentage points from its 2019-20 placement rate. IIT Roorkee recorded the second-largest decline, at 13.7 percentage points. The numbers therefore do not support a single “IIT placement” narrative.

An institution can show a substantial decline from the extraordinary 2021-22 peak and still be placing a larger share of its graduates than it did before the pandemic. Another can see the same post-pandemic decline and end up materially below its earlier position. That distinction is central to understanding what happened after the placement boom.

Why some institutions have been more stable

IIT (BHU) Varanasi has one of the most stable placement records in the dataset. Its placement rate moved only modestly over the five years and stood at 92.8% in 2023-24, above its 90.5% rate in 2019-20.

Dr Vikash Kumar Dubey, Professor, School of Biochemical Engineering, IIT (BHU) Varanasi, attributed the consistency to the breadth of its recruiter base and the processes built around placements.

“The consistent placement performance at IIT (BHU), Varanasi is the outcome of robust institutional processes developed and refined over multiple placement cycles. A key strength is our diversified recruiter base, comprising organizations from core engineering, manufacturing, information technology, product development, data analytics, consulting, financial services, and public sector enterprises.”

Dubey also pointed to a growing internship-to-placement pipeline, an increasing share of Pre-Placement Offers and repeat recruiter relationships. Asked about the relationship between placement performance and IIT (BHU)’s rise from 15th in NIRF’s 2023 engineering ranking to 10th in 2025, he described the relationship as “substantive rather than mechanical”.

Placement outcomes form part of NIRF’s Graduation Outcomes parameter, he said, but the ranking movement also reflected improvements in areas including research productivity, faculty recruitment and sponsored research. The institute’s experience is useful precisely because its placement numbers did not follow the dramatic boom-and-fall pattern seen at several other campuses.

The denominator problem

IIT Roorkee presents a different complication. Its 2023-24 placement rate was 69.8%, 13.7 percentage points below its 2019-20 rate and the second-largest decline in the group. The institute’s first response concerned how its internal placement rate is calculated.

IIT Roorkee said its Placement and Internship Cell counts students who register and actively participate in the placement process, rather than the total sanctioned or admitted intake.

Prof Vivek Pancholi, Faculty Incharge Placement, IIT Roorkee responding to ETEducation stated “The Placement and Internship Cell calculates placement-related statistics with reference to the students who register with the Placement and Internship Cell and actively participated in the placement process…” That distinction matters because the NIRF calculation used in this analysis applies to the graduating cohort.

The two measures can therefore both be accurate while referring to different student populations. Roorkee did not provide the underlying registered-and-participating figures for the relevant cohorts, so its internal rate could not be independently recalculated against the NIRF figure.

The institute also attributed the decline to a change in the recruitment cycle, particularly in information technology. It said hiring had been “sharp and exceptional” across several sectors in 2021-22 and 2022-23 before moving towards a more normal level from 2023-24.

There is, however, a qualification in the institute’s own data. Roorkee’s NIRF placement rate had already fallen from 89.4% in 2021-22 to 80.5% in 2022-23, before declining further to 69.8% in 2023-24. The institute’s response describes moderation beginning from 2023-24, while the disclosed figures show that the decline had begun a year earlier.

On the scale of the decline, the institute said the fall reflected in the analysis appeared significantly larger than the change observed in its own placement outcomes.

“The decline may primarily be attributed to a moderation in hiring in the IT sector, which experienced a slight reduction in the number of recruitment opportunities during the 2023–24 cycle… However, the extent of decline reflected in the analysis appears to be significantly higher than the actual change observed in the placement outcomes at the Institute.”

Without the underlying registered-student figures, the difference between the institute’s internal measure and the NIRF-based measure cannot be quantified.

IIT Kanpur’s placement data raises a similar denominator issue. The institute shared its placement report with ETEducation, which uses students registered with the placement office as the basis for its reported placement rate. That figure relates to a different recruitment cycle and student population from the NIRF data analysed here.

The point is not that one number is right and another wrong. It is that a placement percentage without its denominator is difficult to compare.

The salary story is weaker than the placement story

The placement percentage is only one part of the outcome. Every institution in the dataset reported a higher, or broadly flat, median salary in 2023-24 than in 2019-20 in nominal rupee terms. But after adjusting for inflation, six of the ten recorded a decline in the real value of median salaries, including five where nominal salaries had increased.

IIT Madras’s median salary rose 16.7% in nominal terms over the five-year period but fell by roughly 6% in real terms. IIT Roorkee’s median salary declined even before inflation was taken into account. Its real decline was approximately 22%.

Only IIT Bombay, IIT (BHU) Varanasi and NIT Tiruchirappalli recorded real-terms salary growth over the period. The distinction matters because a rising salary figure does not necessarily represent greater purchasing power for graduates.

For engineering institutions and employers, the nominal package can therefore present a more favourable picture of compensation than the inflation-adjusted figure.

Then there are the students the headline number does not explain When placement rates fall, institutions can point to students choosing higher studies, entrepreneurship or opportunities outside the campus process.

NIRF’s disclosure format allows part of that explanation to be examined because institutions separately report graduating students, students placed and students pursuing higher studies.

Subtracting students placed and students reported as pursuing higher studies from the graduating cohort leaves a residual: students who are neither placed nor pursuing further study, based on the institution’s disclosed figures.

The pattern varies sharply.

At IIT Bombay and IIT Roorkee, the disclosed numbers account for every graduate in each year studied. At NIT Tiruchirappalli, the residual remains consistently large, ranging from 69 to 87 students a year. That suggests a persistent reporting or classification pattern rather than a recent deterioration.

At IIT Delhi, the residual rose from zero in 2021-22 to 186 students in 2023-24, while the reported number pursuing higher studies changed relatively little. The figures do not establish what happened to these students.

NIRF does not provide a separate category for entrepreneurship, self-employment, off-campus employment or other outcomes. The residual should therefore not be treated as a measure of unemployment.

IIT Kanpur’s Students’ Placement Office, in a report shared with ETEducation, similarly noted that some graduating students opt for higher studies, entrepreneurship or off-campus opportunities outside the figures reported by its placement office.

The limitation is nevertheless important: the public data does not always make it possible to distinguish between students who were not placed and students whose destination falls outside the categories captured by NIRF.

IIT Kharagpur’s two numbers

The reliability of the data can also be tested against the institutions’ own filings. NIRF’s reporting structure creates an overlap between successive ranking editions. The same academic year’s data can appear in more than one edition, allowing a later filing to be compared with an earlier one.

The nine NIRF top 10 ranked institutions examined reported identical figures for the overlapping year, 2021-22, across the 2023 and 2025 NIRF editions.

IIT Kharagpur did not.

Its 2023 filing reported 422 students placed and zero in higher studies for the 2021-22 cohort. Its 2025 filing reported 377 placed and 41 in higher studies for the same cohort.

In its written response to ETEducation, IIT Kharagpur said it had reviewed the earlier submission in July 2023 and subsequently made corrective changes with NIRF’s approval. The institute attributed the discrepancy to the structure of NIRF reporting and the treatment of students moving between the four-year B.Tech and five-year Dual Degree programmes.

“The issue is mostly due to the structure of NIRF’s data collection format. The UG and Dual Degree students were admitted against the same seat allocation, but it was not feasible to enter the data in two categories…”

The explanation changes the character of the discrepancy. It indicates that the institute considered the earlier filing to require correction and subsequently addressed it through the NIRF process.

One part of the explanation, however, cannot be reconciled directly with the public NIRF tables. IIT Kharagpur’s UG 4-Year placement table in both the 2023 and 2025 NIRF editions shows 450 graduating students for 2021-22. It does not show 505 in one edition and 450 in the other. The figure of 505 does not appear in the UG 4-Year table in either filing.

That does not necessarily contradict the institute’s broader explanation. NIRF separates programmes by duration, while the institute’s response refers to students moving between four-year and five-year categories.

The response does not, however, provide a combined figure that would allow the 505 figure to be independently reconciled with the public disclosure.

There is a further question. If programme switching was responsible for part of the reporting effect, the extent of that effect would depend on how many students moved between the two programmes. The response does not provide those figures, so the analysis cannot establish whether the same reporting effect applied consistently across the five years.

Kharagpur also said it collects information from graduating students on destinations beyond placements and higher studies.

“We collect data from students in the various categories, including higher studies, placements, Self-employment, etc., upon completion of their degree. This input is compulsory for them.”

The response therefore indicates that the institute has a more granular internal picture of graduate destinations than is visible in its NIRF disclosure.

What the five-year record says

The five-year record does not establish a single story of a placement crisis across India’s leading engineering institutions. It establishes divergence.

The ten institutions studied, 2021-22 was an unusually strong placement year. By 2023-24, placement rates had fallen from that peak.

But compared with 2019-20, three institutions had improved by more than seven percentage points, while IIT Kharagpur and IIT Roorkee were more than ten percentage points below their pre-pandemic rates.

The salary data adds another layer. Nominal median salaries rose at almost every institution, but inflation-adjusted median salaries fell at six of the ten. The institutional responses also show why the headline placement percentage needs context.

IIT (BHU) Varanasi points to recruiter diversity and a stronger internship-to-placement pipeline to explain its stability. IIT Roorkee says its internal placement rate uses a narrower denominator than the NIRF measure and attributes part of its decline to moderation in IT-sector hiring. IIT Kharagpur says its differing NIRF figures resulted from a correction linked to the reporting of students moving between four-year and five-year programmes.

The responses do not resolve every question raised by the data. They do, however, point to a broader limitation in how graduate outcomes are presented.

A placement rate is not a complete measure of graduate outcomes, and the percentage cannot be interpreted properly without knowing who is being counted, what the denominator is and which destinations are captured.

That matters as engineering institutions expand their intake, employers recalibrate campus hiring and policymakers increasingly use graduate outcomes as a measure of institutional performance. For recruiters, the five-year record offers another caution.

The 2021-22 placement peak is a poor standalone benchmark. A comparison with that year can make normalisation in hiring appear larger than it is.

Placement percentages also need a denominator. An 80% placement rate calculated against students who registered for campus placements is not necessarily equivalent to an 80% rate calculated against the full graduating cohort. And salary growth needs to be read in real terms. A higher rupee figure does not automatically mean greater purchasing power for graduates.

The scale of the graduating cohort matters too. IIT Madras’s graduating cohort increased by roughly 84% over the five years studied, while IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay and IIT Kanpur also recorded substantial increases. A stable placement percentage in a larger cohort can therefore represent a significantly larger number of graduates entering the job market.

For institutions, meanwhile, the data points to the value of looking beyond one placement season. IIT (BHU) Varanasi’s relative stability, for example, stands out differently from an institution whose placement rate swings sharply around a single year’s hiring cycle.

The larger question is not whether placement rates matter. They clearly do. It is whether a single percentage can carry as much meaning as it is often asked to carry.

For India’s engineering graduates, employers and institutions, the five-year record suggests that the answer is no.

Institutional responses

ETEducation wrote to all ten institutions with specific questions about their NIRF disclosures and followed up by email and phone where necessary.

IIT (BHU) Varanasi, IIT Kharagpur and IIT Roorkee responded in detail. IIT Kanpur shared a placement report but did not address the specific questions. IIT Delhi acknowledged the query and indicated that a response was forthcoming but had not responded by publication.

IIT Madras, IIT Bombay, IIT Guwahati, IIT Hyderabad and NIT Tiruchirappalli did not respond despite follow-ups.

Methodology

Data is based on institutions’ NIRF submissions for the 2023 and 2025 ranking editions and covers UG 4-Year B.Tech programmes. Five-Year Dual Degree/Integrated programmes are excluded for consistency.Placement rate is students placed as a share of graduates completing the programme in the minimum stipulated time. Salary changes are adjusted for approximately 24% CPI inflation between FY2019-20 and FY2023-24. The residual refers to graduates not reported as placed or pursuing higher studies. It is not a measure of unemployment and excludes unreported outcomes such as entrepreneurship or off-campus employment. No third-party data was used. All ten institutions were given an opportunity to respond before publication.