When credentials outpace jobs, even the most elite degree starts to feel uncertain
For decades, four letters have carried more weight in Indian households than almost any other combination in the English language: IIT. Cracking the Joint Entrance Examination was never just an academic milestone — it was treated as a passport out of uncertainty, a guarantee that hard work in a cramped coaching-centre classroom would eventually translate into a corner office, a fat salary, and the kind of financial security that took previous generations a lifetime to build. That guarantee is now cracking, and the sound is loud enough that even the institutions themselves can no longer pretend not to hear it.
To understand why this is happening, it helps to remember what made the IIT tag so valuable in the first place. It was never really about the quality of a four-year engineering education alone — plenty of countries produce excellent engineers without turning admission into a national obsession. What made IITs different was scarcity. A handful of seats, an examination brutal enough to filter out all but the most relentless, and an economy hungry enough for skilled talent that companies would fly in recruiters and dangle offers before students had even finished their final semester. Scarcity plus demand equals value. That was the entire equation.
But equations change when the variables do. The number of IITs has grown from seven to twenty-three over the past two decades, alongside a parallel explosion of NITs, IIITs, and private engineering colleges all claiming a slice of the same "premier institute" branding. Meanwhile, the kind of entry-level, high-volume hiring that IT services giants once did — thousands of fresh graduates absorbed every year into training programmes — has slowed considerably as automation, AI tooling, and cautious global spending reshape what companies actually need from a twenty-two-year-old with a degree.
Parliamentary committee data cited in recent months paints an uncomfortable picture: a majority of IITs have seen placement rates decline over the last few years, with double-digit percentage-point drops at several institutes. Average salary packages, too, have softened at a number of NITs. These aren't fringe campuses or new additions struggling to establish themselves — some of the sharpest declines have hit institutes that, a decade ago, were synonymous with placement seasons so successful they made national news for the size of the offers, not the number of students left without one.
What's striking is how quickly the narrative has flipped. A few years ago, the story was about record-breaking crore-plus packages going to a handful of toppers. Today, the story is about the other end of the distribution — the growing tail of graduates from India's most selective institutions who finish their final semester with no offer letter in hand at all. Both stories are true simultaneously, and that gap tells you more about India's job market than either headline alone.
The easy explanation is a slowing economy or a temporary hiring freeze, and there's some truth to that. But it would be a mistake to treat this purely as a cyclical downturn that will correct itself once markets recover. There's a structural mismatch at play too. Curricula at many engineering institutes, IITs included, have struggled to keep pace with how quickly the skills employers actually want have shifted — particularly in software and technology roles, where the bar has moved from "can code" to "can build and deploy AI-integrated systems at scale" in the space of a couple of years. A degree that certifies competence in a 2018 version of the industry doesn't automatically certify competence in the 2026 version.
There's also a less comfortable truth about volume. When the answer to "how do we build a more competitive India" has repeatedly been "build more IITs, more IIMs, more technical institutes," the sheer supply of credentialed graduates was always going to eventually outpace the number of roles that genuinely require — or reward — that specific credential. A brand built on being rare cannot be scaled indefinitely without diluting the very thing that made it valuable.
None of this means an IIT education is worthless — the engineering fundamentals, the peer network, the sheer rigour of getting through four years of that coursework still count for something. But it does mean the unwritten social contract — clear the exam, endure the workload, and a job is essentially assured — no longer holds the way it once did. For the millions of teenagers currently grinding through coaching institutes on the promise of that contract, and for the parents financing it, this is a moment that demands recalibrated expectations rather than blind faith in a three-letter acronym.
The deeper conversation India needs to have isn't really about IITs specifically. It's about what happens to a country's talent pipeline when credentialism outpaces the job creation needed to absorb it — and whether the answer lies in building more prestige institutions, or in finally building the industries and roles capable of putting those graduates to work. The dream isn't dead. But it is, undeniably, no longer a guarantee — and pretending otherwise does a disservice to everyone still chasing it.
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
