A Lesson from IIT Placements

THE INDIAN INSTITUTE of Technology (IIT) Bombay came out with its placement report and in it was mentioned that 85 students had got offers of an annual salary of more than a crore rupees. A few days later came the clarification that it was an er­ror and the real number was 22, which is still respectable given that most Indians would spend a lifetime work­ing and never touch the paycheque these youths were beginning with. There are riders there. Only three of those are positions in India and the rest are abroad where `1 crore is nowhere near as stratospheric as it appears here. A report in a national newspaper also added that IITs are now considering not revealing how much these top offers are because it increases the stress on students and parents who fall into the trap of false expectations. This makes some sense but does not really consider the glass-half-full side.

If you extend the argument, then the very idea of even attempting to get into an IIT is unreal for most who take the exam. From the lakhs who attempt, only a few thousands get in, which means that unless there is something exceptional in a student to begin with, like an extremely high IQ, he or she has almost no chance whatsoever. Because India is enormously populated with a huge number of students, even gifted ones will need to be one-pointed for years and that needs either family pressure or unnatural levels of individual drive. What are all the other students doing except humouring false expectations?

But that misses a crucial factor. The very act of trying to scale this mountain makes them more eligible for lesser peaks. Many of those who don’t get into an IIT, manage to enter engineering colleges where the entrance bar is not as high and the IIT preparation helps them. They end up leading prosperous lives in great careers because the way modern Indian society is structured, there is a premium on engineering over plain vanilla degrees. They won’t get the wealth, security, or brides and husbands that IIT graduates get, but it will still be better than what fate bequeaths streams like Commerce or Arts.

The reason why so many aspire to join IIT despite the near-impossibility of the dream is also precisely because of news items that appear every year that say someone has got over a crore at a placement on campus. It is a hyp­notic lure that cuts across everyone in the household. Very few go into an IIT because of a love of engineering and you can see that in how many imme­diately do management courses and never make use of any of the education they received with government subsi­dy. The false expectation of a crore turns out to be a good thing because it gives them a lakh, which any 22-year-old should happily take in India. Becoming above average chasing delusions is not a bad thing at all when you consider the alternative.

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