New Delhi: The civil engineering branch has registered the lowest placement rate – 43% – in 2020-21 in 10 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), analysis by Careers360 showed.
According to the report, other colleges, including the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), showed a similar trend.
The report is based on replies to Right to Information (RTI) applications filed by Careers360.
Of the 13 IITs, only 10 shared relevant data that could be used for the right comparison. A few colleges did not share their data – or the data was miscalculated or unclear – and some did not offer civil engineering. They were excluded from the analysis, said the report.
As per the analysis, 57% of civil engineering students who had registered for placements got the job, whereas only 43% of the students who were enrolled in the course were placed.
In terms of absolute numbers, of the 328 civil engineering students who sought placements, 142 did not get placed. Of the 437 students enrolled in the course, 251 were not placed.
A large chunk of civil engineering students did not participate in placements, the report added.
On comparing with the overall placement rate, the report highlighted that the disparity is very high as per IIT standards and student expectations.
For instance, IIT Delhi’s civil engineering placement rate in 2020-21 was 66% compared to the overall placement rate of 86%, while IIT Gandhinagar placed 42% of civil engineers in 2020-21 as compared to the overall placement rate of 69%.
IIT Patna performed the worst with only 30% of civil engineers being placed as compared to the overall placement rate of 68%.
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IIT Guwahati placed 51% of civil engineers as compared to the overall placement rate of 78%. In IIT Kharagpur, 71% of civil engineers were placed in 2020-21 as compared to an overall 88% placement rate.
This was the trend in every IIT considered individually, except IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur.
Interestingly, the placement rate in the core engineering branches such as BTech in Computer Science Engineering (CSE) was also low. For example, at IIT Guwahati, 83 out of 87 students enrolled in B.Tech in CSE registered for placement and only 78 were ultimately placed. However, the numbers were even worse in the case of civil engineering students. Of the 71 students enrolled, only 53 registered for placement (75%) and only 27 were placed.
When compared with the total enrollments in both the branches, 37% were placed in civil engineering and about 90% in CSE.
The report also found similar wide gaps between an institution’s average salary and the salary of civil engineering graduates.
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The average salary across the 10 IITs was Rs 15.6 lakh. However, for civil engineering students, it was Rs 11.10 lakh – around 30% lower than the average salary across all the branches.
For instance, at IIT Guwahati, while the average salary across branches is about Rs 19 lakh and students of CSE averaged Rs 29 lakh, the civil engineering students were placed at an average salary of Rs 13 lakh.
The widest gap was at IIT Patna – with a variance as high as 50%, followed by IIT Hyderabad. While the average annual salary package offered to graduates from IIT Patna was Rs 13 lakh, civil engineering students were offered around Rs 7 lakh. In the case of IIT Hyderabad, the overall average was Rs 20 lakh while civil engineering students bagged an average of Rs 10.7 lakh.
IIT Madras offered an average package of Rs 17.3 lakh to civil engineering graduates, the best among all the institutes, the report said.
The range of salaries across IITs varied widely. IIT Madras offered a maximum annual salary of Rs 52.5 lakh and a minimum salary of Rs 7 lakh to civil engineering students in 2020-21. Similarly, IIT Guwahati’s maximum annual package went up to Rs 30 lakh while the minimum salary remained at Rs 7 lakh.
The lowest minimum salary offered was Rs 5 lakh at IIT-ISM Dhanbad, followed by Rs 5.16 lakh at IIT Patna.
In IIT Patna, Rs 9 lakh was offered as the maximum annual salary while Rs 5.16 lakh was the minimum salary.
Careers360 analysed placement record data from the College of Engineering (CoE), Anna University to see if these trends extend to the regional level.
Of the 89 students from the civil engineering branch who opted for placement, only eight students were placed. Of the 89 students, 47 were from English medium and 40 were from Tamil medium. The average salary was Rs 4.58 lakh for English-medium candidates and Rs 4.4 lakh for the lone Tamil-medium student.
However, in the Computer Science Engineering branch, of the 283 students who registered for placement, 235 got the job. The average salary was Rs 9.22 lakh and Rs 7.26 lakh in two of the colleges.