NIT Placements: Under 80% BTech Students Placed Across Top NITs Over 5 Years

National Institute of Technology (NIT) Tiruchirappalli in Tamil Nadu, the top-ranked NIT on the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), has placed an average of 71% of its graduating BTech students in jobs over the past five years. NIT Rourkela in Odisha, ranked third, has done better with job drives, placing 90 percent of their students over the same five years.

For the past six years, the ministry of education’s NIRF has been ranking engineering colleges based on a range of factors including an institution’s placement record. To rank an engineering college for one year, NIRF considers placement data, including numbers placed and median salary, for three years. An earlier analysis of such data revealed that India’s top 50 engineering colleges together placed an average of about 70 percent of students.

The NITs are Institutes of National Importance and, run by the central government, are highly regarded among public engineering colleges. NIT Tiruchirappalli has ranked at the top among all NITs since the NIRF rankings began in 2016. In 2020, NIT Karnataka replaced Rourkela as the second-best NITs, a position it had held since 2016. NIT Warangal is steady as the fourth-highest ranked NIT. In NIRF 2017 and 2018, NIT Calicut was at rank 44 and 50. After 2018, NIT Calicut constantly improved its position, becoming one of the top five NITs for the last three years.

Therefore, NIT Tiruchirappalli, Karnataka, Rourkela, Warangal and Calicut are the top five NITs across the country and were selected for this analysis because they have remained in the top five for the last three years. Also, all five have always been among the top 50 engineering institutes since the ranking started.

NIT Placements: 2015-19

Among the top five NITs, NIT Calicut had the highest placement percentage in 2020 and 2021 year but it still holds the fifth rank as per the NIRF ranking. NIT Calicut had a placement percentage of around 61 percent till 2016-17 and was not among the top five NITs till then. Its ranking improved as did its placement record, by 26 percentage points.

On the other hand, NIT Tiruchirappalli held the first rank among all the NITs across the country in all the NIRF rankings but has had the lowest students placements percentage of the top five over the past three years in a row. In 2017 it had placed 72.43 percent of students who had signed up for jobs but in 2021, it dropped to 69.24 percent. However, the sharpest drop in placements over the five-year period was at NIT Rourkela where the percentage of students placed plummeted over 20 percentage points.

The placement percentage of all these top NITs was calculated on the basis of the number of placed students and the students who graduated in the minimum stipulated time. Some of those from the graduating batch of BTechs who were not placed could have gone for higher studies.

NIT Placements: Graduating BTechs placed over 5 years (in %)

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NIT Placement: Salaries Rose Marginally

Although NIT Tiruchirappalli posted the lowest placement percentage, the median salary at which its graduates were hired has increased quite steadily over the last five years.

Tiruchirappalli, Warangal, Karnataka and Calicut all showed a steady increase in their median salaries from 2017 to 2021. But for NIT Rourkela, the median salary in 2015-16 and 2019-20 are practically the same. It saw a dip in the median salary in 2016-17 after which it took four years to reach the same milestone. NIT Warangal saw a similar dip the same year as Rourkela but recovered much faster, achieving the maximum median salary for 2017-18. The chart below shows how salaries have risen or fallen at each of the five NITs over the five years.

Engineering Jobs: Top NITs placements over 5 years

Also Read | IIT Kharagpur Placed Over 85% Students in 2020-21: Branch-Wise Placement Report

Jobs And Higher Studies

More than 20 percent of NIT Tiruchirappalli students opt for higher studies while that figure for the other NITs in this analysis is 10 percent.

NIT BTech students who opted for higher studies (In %)

However, it is not correct to assume that everyone not landing a job is going for further studies. Study of the data shared by these institutions with NIRF shows that only about 90 percent of the total number of students to graduate went for jobs or further studies. There is still another 10 percent whose future is not known.