What do I want in campus placement data

Every year, educational institutions are going to make certain claims about jobs that their graduates have secured, and more often than not, the data will give no real picture to anyone (and surprisingly, even the students about whom this data is will certify on social media that this data is correct, when it is not).

The placement data is the most important parameter in the minds of potential students and parents. It is also a fairly important parameter for NIRF ranking and accreditation. And that gives a huge incentive to institutions to fudge this data, at least in ways in which they can claim that they weren't lying (if data were to leak out). And if some do it, it puts additional pressure on those who wouldn't have done it otherwise. But speaking truth will hurt them disproportionately.

Most institutions will give a couple of numbers: What fraction of students received jobs, and what were the highest and average salary packages.

How are they fudged. The fraction of students receiving jobs is often calculated over their most popular programs only. So in an engineering college, it would be only for BTech program and would not consider MTech students whose placements are typically poorer. Second thing that would happen is that it would be calculated over "eligible students" and not over all graduating students. Different institutions would have different definitions of "eligible." Some would consider those eligible who have a CGPA of higher than a certain threshold (since very poor CGPA students would find it difficult to get a job, so why include them in the announced data). Similarly, some would exclude those with a few fail grades. Some may consider only those who have applied for at least N jobs. (Apparently those who apply for very few jobs and not succeed in them are not really serious in placement. Why should we consider them in our data and reduce our numbers.) But, hey, if you are giving someone a degree, shouldn't you consider him ready to take up a job. Or is it that your degree has no value in the job market.

There is more. Suppose there are 100 eligible students. 70 students get one job offer each. And 10 students get two job offers. So 80 students get 90 offers. Most institutions will call it 90 percent placement, hiding the minor detail that it was impossible for a student to give his/her job away to some other student.

And then we come to packages. Here, the companies will fudge. We will shout at them, but then in our statistics, we will use their fudged numbers. So the maximum possible bonus value which very few employees are likely to get will be added to salary component. The initial joining expenses/reimbursements will be added. The value of shares which you can sell only if you stay on for 5 years will be added (and not even divided by 5). And so on. So the maximum will be higher than what truly will be the income of the graduate. Finally, we will talk about average and not median which is a better indicator of spread in this case. We will do that since average is always higher than median when it comes to placement packages. A few top packages will skew the average.

What would I like to see as a parent of potential student. Ideally nothing. I would only like to check the credentials of faculty before choosing the place to study. But, that is not the answer anyone is satisfied with. So here is the next piece of information I would like to see.

Let us first talk about BTech program. How many of your recent graduates got a job, or admission to a higher degree program, or joined a family business, or started a company of their own. Basically, what fraction of your graduates are doing something meaningful (and I personally don't consider dropping a year to study GATE as meaningful, your mileage may vary). When it comes to a job, I would only consider jobs which are about double of minimum wages plus yearly interest on the cost of degree. So, if the cost of the program was 10 lakhs, and considering that today's minimum wages are about Rs. 12,500 per month, I would only consider jobs which pay about Rs. 35,000 per month or Rs. 4 lakhs a year. (twice of 12.5 K, and 10K per month of interest payment).

When it comes to MTech program, the cost of the program is rather small, since one gets a decent stipend every month, which takes care of a significant part of the cost. But still, if you had a loan from your BTech program, that would have accumulated more interest, and you have 2 additional years. So the expectation should be at least 5 lakhs a year. (Notice, the assumption is that one got a stipend, didn't spend much more than stipend on the education. If these assumptions do not hold for a particular program, then I would only consider jobs of higher remuneration for those programs.)

And similarly for PhD program, I would consider only those jobs which give more than 7-8 lakhs.

Now, will a university tell me what fraction of all their graduates are doing a job with certain minimum compensation, or higher studies, or family business, or startup (include anything else which is a reasonable outcome of education).

The universities won't do that. And their reluctance is not only due to fear of losing competitive advantage, but also internal.

As I wrote in my previous blog, a consistently poor performance of a program would raise questions about its possible closure. No one wants to do that. So it is best that such information is hidden from everyone. In fact, in terms of jobs, we can add one more information. How many of those jobs were in technical areas, and how many of them were in non-technical areas. Now, we should be able to review all programs. Consider a program with 50 students. If only a couple of students go for technical jobs, and another couple of them for technical higher education, while may be another 20-30 get sales/marketing/finance jobs or go for MBA, should we continue with this program, or transfer these seats to a popular program so that more of our students can follow their passion.

Having quality data easily available would help both potential students/parents on one side and the decision makers on the other. But a unilateral declaration by one college would hurt that college in admissions.

How do we go about ensuring that a large enough set of colleges give out quality data in the same year. Or alternately, everyone at least describe their methodology, whom they include/exclude, for example. How do we ensure this.