As median salaries fall for Class of 2024, is engineering losing it sheen?

Engineering graduates are in a fix. Their salaries aren’t growing. If anything, their pay packages are lower than those of graduates in previous years. The situation is particularly bad for the class of 2024—even for those who attended India’s premier engineering institutes, the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). 

Every year, the Ministry of Education releases its National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) after assessing institutes of higher education in the country on 19 parameters, including student-faculty ratio, diversity, graduation outcome, online education, and diversity. As part of the exercise, colleges and universities are mandated to submit data to the ministry for the previous academic year, including the number of students and faculty, information on research facilities, and placement details. The window for submitting the data for the 2025 rankings closed a few weeks back.

However, while the ranking still aren’t out, The CapTable accessed and analysed the data submitted to the Ministry of Education by India’s top engineering colleges. It shows that in the academic year 2023-24 (AY24), the median salaries of placed students fell across the majority of these institutions. This holds true for nine of the top 10 IITs, too. (The median salary is the middle value of all salaries when arranged in ascending or descending order. Put simply, half the people earn more than the median salary, and half earn less.)

To understand the data better, we divided the engineering colleges into two categories—the top 20 IITs and NITs (National Institutes of Technology), and the Top 20 other engineering colleges. In the first category, only three colleges—IIT Madras, NIT Rourkela, and NIT Calicut—reported higher median salaries in AY24.