Indian College Placements are a Joke

“My friend got 15 LPA by literally cheating on everything. The night before, he was searching for projects on GitHub to add to his resume. He cheated on the OA round and faked everything.”

That line from a Reddit thread is sad, but it sums up what’s happening in India’s most celebrated engineering colleges. Once seen as the sure-shot reward for years of grinding through exams and coaching, campus placements are losing credibility. And it’s not just because of a few students lying on their resumes. The system itself is showing cracks.

Placements are supposed to be the final validation of an institute’s quality. They are bannered on websites, in NIRF rankings, and in brochures. But the numbers are sliding, and no amount of spin is hiding it.

Government data presented to Parliament earlier this year revealed that 22 of the 23 IITs saw a drop in BTech placements between 2021-22 and 2023-24, with 15 of them seeing double-digit declines. Placements at IIT Delhi slipped from nearly 88% to 73%, at IIT Dharwad from about 90% to 66%, and IIT Jammu saw the figure crash from 92% to 70%. 

Even the top names — Bombay, Madras, Kanpur — all saw 10-13 percentage point drops.

The story is the same at the NITs. Of the 31 institutions, 27 reported falling average salary packages last year compared to the previous year. The number of NIT students placed dropped from 18,957 in 2022-23 to 16,915 in 2023-24, a fall of almost 11%. This isn’t a blip. It’s a trend.

The Ones Placed Are Also Average

The sense of disillusionment is widespread among students. Another Redditor put it sharply: “Most people cheat the OAs or have shit-ton of referrals. There are just some 20% who study properly and get into good companies. The rest are just getting average companies by faking projects or references.”

That bitterness is telling. Students are working the system, but employers are catching on. Cheating an online assessment may land you an interview, but it doesn’t get you through a live coding round or keep you afloat once you’re on the job.

The economy isn’t helping either. Global headwinds, layoffs in tech, cautious hiring. Even companies that used to hire in bulk from campuses are cutting numbers. For example, Indian IT aims to hire 1 lakh freshers this year. But at the same time, they are also laying off massively. 

This gap between perception and reality feeds cynicism. As one Reddit post put it: “The numbers shown by colleges are mostly inflated. For the majority, it’s service-based companies at 5–8 LPA. If you remove the handful of top offers, the average collapses.”

Some roles are being automated, others are being offshored or moved to contract work. For example, in a recent interaction with AIM, Hexaware CTO Satyajith Mundakkal said the young generation is excessively reliant on AI coding tools. 

He noted that resistance to AI tools is inevitable. “If I take GitHub Copilot away, 90% of my young population will struggle to code. They use these as coaches and guides. Our more senior population looks at it with a critical eye. They validate the work. That’s their role.”

Read: Hexaware CTO Says Without AI, 90% of Young Coders Would Struggle

The market has shifted, but students and colleges are still clinging to the old model where everyone expected a placement and a fat package at the end of four years, and now they are too reliant on AI for it. 

Eduard Ruzga, a staff engineer at Prezi, earlier told AIM that he doesn’t rely on GitHub activity as a hiring signal. “I would look at PRs if I wanted to learn about a potential candidate. There are other things that spike activity without real work,” he noted. What matters, according to him, is the reasoning and code quality.

Read: Are Developers Faking it on GitHub Using AI Coding Tools?

Everyone is Cheating

The hype around packages distorts the picture further. Every year, headlines trumpet crore-plus offers at IITs. What doesn’t get said is that those are rare, a handful of international postings, often including the cost of relocation, taxes, and stock components that may never vest.

The new changes to the H-1B visa policy with the $100,000 fee is going to make even those scarce. For the majority, the salaries are modest, sometimes lower than what family and friends believe based on the hype.

So placements are not just declining in percentage terms, but also losing out in value. The distribution is skewed with only a few getting stellar offers, most settle for less, some get nothing. Yet the brochures and media coverage keep selling the dream.

Companies, for their part, are moving away from trusting resumes or college brands. They’re running their own assessments, hiring through competitions, poaching through referrals. The old campus model — one visit, mass hiring — is shrinking. That leaves many students stranded.

The Reddit voices sound harsh, but they capture the mood on campuses better than any official statement. One user wrote: “Placements are just luck now. You either get a good referral, or you rot. Skills don’t matter unless you can show them in the exact format companies want.” 

Another said: “We’re all playing a game where everyone is cheating. The ones who don’t get left behind.”