In the race for fat pay packages, graduates from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB), are ahead of law and engineering graduates.
The IIMB, which just concluded final placements, had students of its flagship Post Graduate Programme (PGP) taking home an average domestic salary of `19.5 lakh (`17.4 lakh in case of students with no work experience). Some recruiters offer international postings, with higher salaries. The closest competitor is the National Law School of India University, whose graduates are taking home an average of `12 lakh.
“PGP is a highly-specialised course and almost all our students have worked for a couple of years and have come here to do a course at the management level. They will be paid accordingly. Law or engineering are graduate courses. They are younger and usually come with no experience,” said Sapna Agarwal, head, Career Development Services, IIMB. A look at placement trends in the top four engineering colleges (in terms of students’ preference) shows that the average salary remains between `3.5 lakh and `6 lakh in M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology, P E S Institute of Technology, R V College of Engineering and B M S College of Engineering. The highest package was `16.5 lakh at MSRIT.
“From a purely placement prospective, engineering students look towards the IT sector. However, core branches such as electronics and communications and electrical and electronics are preferred for learning. As undergraduates, they won’t be eligible for the kind of compensation IIM grads get,” said K S Sridhar, dean, training and placement at PESIT (now PES University).
V S Elizabeth, faculty placement coordinator at NLSIU, feels most students join law for the money they get. “This is why there are so many law schools now, thanks to the high-paying firms. In the last 20 batches, only four to five have gone on to do MBA. Others are happy with what they get.”
Undergraduate management students get an average of `3 lakh to `4 lakh from reputed colleges, said Dinesh Nilkant, head, Centre for Management Studies, Jain University.
“I don’t think companies are willing to pay higher for BBA graduates, who are mostly hired for entry-level jobs,” he said. The trend nowadays is that students no longer want to work for a couple of years and then do MBA.
“More students want to do MBA after graduation, do internship, gain experience, get ready for the market and enter the corporate world,” he said.
A whopping 91 per cent of students in the 2013-15 PGP batch at IIMB come from an engineering background.
The Common Admission Test (CAT) itself focuses a lot on analytical and quantitative abilities, making it easier for engineers to crack it, Sapna Agarwal said.
‘Talent Everywhere’
Savitha Konna M, head of training and placement at MSRIT, said recruiters are no longer concentrating on hiring from a few premier institutions.
“We had many first-time recruiters and one such company came with a `19.5 lakh-a-year offer,” she said.
Recruiters such as Infosys, LinkedIn, Yahoo! and Microsoft are some that hire from both engineering and management institutions. Law graduates are picked up by specialised firms.
“Placements for management and law students are different from those of engineering students. Sectors such as communications, computer science, electronics need engineering roles that are not unique. That is why engineers are not paid so attractively,” said M K Sridhar, dean, Commerce and Management, Bangalore University.