Why are 38% of IIT graduates unplaced in 2024?
Last Updated: 21.06.2025 09:33
In the year 2024, the issue of 38 % of IIT graduates being unplaced caused some feeling of alarm and concern from the populace. IIT graduates have always been viewed as the ones who have gone through the best of India's technical education and are able to secure the best jobs with the highest pay packages. But this year’s placement season was different. This paper seeks to address the question why most of these highly skilled students went home empty handed:
One of the biggest transformations that the job market has faced was in the year 2024. A lot of people in the technology sector lost their jobs as many more multinational organizations cut down jobs as a result of economic recession, high prices, and little customer consumption. This altered the ways in which tech companies recruited new workers as they became more stringent or completely suspended recruitment.
Notwithstanding Rohan’s exceptional talent in coding, while attending interviews he understood that companies focus on recruiting the candidates who possess ‘hands-on’ experience in AI and deep learning rather than theoretical knowledge, which how even he had none. Some of his peers despite having poor command of the AI design tools assackocked low offers.
The Shifting Job Market
Over the last few years, the curriculum that is offered in the IITs has become more and more theory based where most of the students focus on the conventional streams such as mechanical or civil engineering. But industries were narrowing towards artificial intelligence, data science and machine learning in an aggressive phase. As a result this led to an imbalance between the skills that the graduates possessed and the requirements in the job market.
As a result, Rohan hoped to aim for the piles of bulk hiring companies such as Google and Amazon who are well known for bulk hiring students from IIT’s. But in 2024 half of these companies’ intake was cut as a result of restructuring these businesses and engaging in cost reduction.
Rohan, an Indian Institute of Technology graduate of Computer Science felt very positive as he was going to complete his final year. His performance was impressive with it being evident from his having a CGPA of 8.5 and being actively engaged in a number of projects and even having therest of a high-tech startup. Yet, when the placement opportunity came, he was left with no offer. He was not an isolated case-In fact, many of his classmates with some of them having even far better GPAs found themselves in the same quagmire.
The Story of Rohan: An Example of the 2024 Placement Challenges
Skills vs. Industry Demand Mismatch