The Placement Tamasha

A large fraction of you must've heard about the flurry of articles about engineering placements, ranging from student from XYZ college gets 70LPA/60LPA/40LPA/whatever to 1900/2000 students placed in TCS, woohoo!

It's mostly the IITs that take centrestage in such discussions, and these discussions take place in the media.

I find this a worrying trend, because the media does not present an accurate picture of the placement scenario. For example. a signnificant fraction of students get jobs on their own/go abroad for further studies, these guys are never counted. Salary figures are heavily distorted by the media before publication as well.

Hell, recently a guy with a 90,000 dollar taxable income made headlines 'IITian gets 70 lakh offer'.

Lets ignore the issue of woeful (optimistic?) journalistic mathematics for now.

Why do we need to know this guy's package? Why do we have to covnert it from dollars/euros to rupees? Why do we have to discuss the salary?

There's a slew of posts about this headline on the net- some congratulations, some IIT jingoism and a lot of bitterness ("Congratulations on becoming another corporate slave" "Stop sending our talent abroad")

Lets take a step back here, since when has a good start to one's career become a national headline?
I have no answers and I shan't waste my time pointing out the obvious.

What I do know is the reason these misleading placement 'headlines' have become more frequent.

I blame NSIT.

They had 1 Schlumberger placement a few years ago and they harped on it like someone had won a nobel prize. The college quickly shot into no.1 position in placements and top 10 slots in a slew of rankings.

Here's the kicker though, Schlum had also picked up people from the IITs/BITS etc (since the company doesn't recruit just 1 guy in a year).
However these older colleges didn't count the Schlum placement abroad as part of their respective placement datasets.

So NSIT skyrocketed in value, parents sent their children there, and all sorts of tamasha ensued, all despite relatively unexceptional placements.

The other colleges are a little riled up now, because they realized that gaming the media goes a big way to determine annual rankings. So we have a grand cockfight with all colleges rushing to reach the lowest common denominator now,

BITS - 8 grads with 40 LPA! 12 in Facebook!!! IITKGP- 70LPA in FBook! IIT-D 30 LPA IN INDIA!!! IIIT-H 60 LPA IN FACEBOOK.

Chalo, what do I care. I'm not getting a job till I start studying.