IIIT-Hyderabad beats IITs to bag the best median salaries for BTech grads

HYDERABAD: Standing 38 ranks below India’s top B Tech school — the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras — Hyderabad’s International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT-H) has recorded higher median salaries for its graduates during the 2017-18 placement season. This has been revealed by the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) in its report released on April 9.
While graduates from IITMadras bagged a median salary of Rs 13.06 lakh, it was at least four lakh higher — Rs 20.35 lakh — for students passing out of IIIT-H.Median salary is the statistical middle figure which is arrived at after all students’ offers are ranked in an increasing order.

The NIRF report shows that median salaries of graduates from all top IITs, including Bombay, Delhi, Kharagpur and Kanpur, lags far behind that of IIIT BTech graduates who have seen a significant jump in average pay packages — from Rs 10.30 lakh to Rs 23.55 lakh — over the last five years.
‘Facebook and Apple started recruiting from IIIT-Hyderabad first and went to IITs later’
PJ Narayanan, director, IIIT-H said: “IIIT-Hyderabad has always been a highly preferred institution among top global and Indian corporates to hire professionals.” “Companies such as Facebook and Apple started with IIIT-Hyderabad and added IITs in subsequent years. The research-led education that the institute offers produces graduates who are better suited to solve unstructured problems, exploring options by themselves. This has been appreciated by these companies.”
Experts and IIT authorities, offer another explanation. While lauding IIIT’s focus on research, they say that it is the institute’s course structure that makes the difference in median salaries. It offers engineering degrees only in computer science.
“The median salary of IIIT-Hyderabad as opposed to IITs may be higher as it only focuses on one department i.e. computer science where the packages offered by the industry are much higher. At IITs, there are multiple disciplines that are on offer. Hence, the median salaries of IITians is lower because it is calculated taking into consideration the salaries across all departments,” said a faculty member of IIT-Delhi. “If one is to compare only the computer science department, then the median salary in IITs would be much higher than IIIT-Hyderabad.”
In an e-mail response to TOI, Bhaskar Ramamurti, director, IIT-Madras too made a similar observation and stressed the need for a disciplinewise analysis. “We are not comparing similar cohorts here. We need to look at this discipline-wise. The IIIT is likely to have mostly CSE graduates,” Ramamurti wrote.