Are b schools redundant? Take a look at the latest on the IIT placement front.
Business Standard reports:
With the IITs just a week into their placements' process, the number of companies making placement offers this year has increased, almost doubling in a few cases. Moreover, these companies have already made huge offers to the students.
Besides, while the highest international offer has seen a 11 per cent increase this year, domestic offers have risen anywhere between 20-100 per cent.
For instance, at IIT Delhi an overseas offer of $100,000 (around Rs 45.50 lakh) was made by a US-based speciality fixed income manager Pimco. At IIT Bombay, the highest salary package offered so far is $92000 (around Rs 42 lakh) by Mercer Oliver Wyman - a Boston-based financial consulting firm.
The new logic seems to be: Why run after guys at IIMs/ other Bschools when guys from IITs can do pretty much the same job? The premise being that what you learn in a bschool isn't that important anyways... it's the raw material that gets in which is the key thing.
Since IITians constitute a healthy chunk of that raw material may as well go directly to IIT and pick 'em up two years earlier. Makes sense from a company point of view.
The question is: is this just a temporary demand-supply blip? ie Are companies adopting novel strategies in a year when demand for workers with certain kinds of skills has gone through the roof? Or, is this a trend for the long term.
First, we had Indian software companies which hire any old engineer (not just computer science/ IT) because all of them are numerical-minded, and beyond that, well they are malleable. Now you have funds and investment banks thinking the same way.
Of course, no one from IIT will join an Indian software company today because the 'quality of work' sucks. Wonder whether that sentiment would apply to the work they will get in these funds and i-banks, given the pay packets...
Putting things in perspective, today, we're only talking of a handful of students going the Pimco way. (The media needs to be careful about reporting the facts. As far as I know this is NOT the first time McKinsey is visiting the IIT B campus!).
In years to come, the numbers may swell. Much depends on how the first few batches of recruits shape up.
Interestingly, G Sinha, Professor in-charge, training and placement at IIT Kharagpur remarked to BS,"The institute does not have international placements as it is dedicated itself to the service of the nation."
Which is rummy and all that, but companies like Barclays Capital, Bain and Company, Opera Solutions and Lehman Brothers come to recruit students at IIT KGP. Just because they don't send them abroad from day 1 does not mean their job profile is closer to the objective of 'service of the nation'!
So honestly, I sense that IITs themselves are confused about what to do with this ardent courtship of its students by the free market. At the back of their mind lies the question, what about the 'T' in IIT. A question which surfaces every now and then, but is never satisfactorily answered...
Also read: Placement, as seen through the eyes of an IIT Madras student.
