India's ranked colleges claim more good jobs than the country has
The finding. About 7.78 million Indians finish an undergraduate degree each year. In the first years after they leave, one in ten holds a formal job and seven in a thousand hold one paying ₹50,000 a month — 55,108 such jobs nationally. India’s NIRF-ranked colleges say they produced 83,764 of them.
The two numbers
Section titled “The two numbers”Measured over three years from each course’s normal completion age — when a college’s placement figure is supposed to come true.
| Finish each year | In formal work | Earning ≥₹6 lakh | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engineering | 784,517 | 34.6% | 4.42% |
| Doctors (MBBS, BDS) | 85,934 | 26.6% | 9.99% |
| Everything else | 6,905,549 | 7.6% | 0.17% |
| All graduates | 7,776,000 | 10.5% | 0.71% |
Placement reconciles. Salary does not.
Section titled “Placement reconciles. Salary does not.”| Ranked colleges claim | Exists nationally | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Engineering, placed | 159,731 | 271,802 | 0.59× ✓ |
| Engineering, ≥₹6 lakh | 62,612 | 34,689 | 1.80× ✗ |
| Everything else, ≥₹6 lakh | 17,404 | 11,833 | 1.47× ✗ |
| Doctors, ≥₹6 lakh | 3,748 | 8,586 | 0.44× ✓ |
263 ranked engineering colleges claim 1.8 times the country’s entire supply of entry-level ₹6 lakh jobs — after we have already cut every reported salary by 20%. Their placement claims fit fine. The gap is in what students are said to be paid, not in how many got hired.
The over-claim is in the tail, not the top
Section titled “The over-claim is in the tail, not the top”| Colleges | UG graduates | Jobs ≥₹6 lakh | |
|---|---|---|---|
| IIT + NIT + IIIT | 55 | 33,786 | 21,623 |
| Every other ranked college | 208 | 191,227 | 40,990 |
The audited public institutions account for 62% of every entry-level ₹6 lakh job in India, from 4% of engineering graduates — and fit inside the national pool with room to spare. The other 208 ranked colleges claim more, by themselves, than the whole pool contains.
The top of the ranking is credible. Its tail is not.
Why the national figure holds up
Section titled “Why the national figure holds up”₹50,000 a month is the 90th percentile for an employed engineering graduate aged 22–24 (median ₹28,000). Three checks, all reproducible:
- Audited anchor — if the survey missed elite young engineers, the IITs and NITs alone would overflow the pool. They fill 62% of it.
- Coverage — 71% urban; 58% of employed engineering graduates are in software, at ₹32,600 a month. That is the mass-recruiter band. The survey is finding the right people.
- Sampling — bootstrapped over 916 survey clusters: 4.42%, CI [2.19%, 7.19%]. Even the upper bound leaves the pool short of what NIRF claims.
The finding also survives the modelling choices: across any plausible within-college salary spread the over-claim stays between 1.67× and 1.98×, and removing the model entirely changes the answer by 1.2%.
What to read next
Section titled “What to read next”The argument is in README.md, the full method and every decision in
METHOD.md, rebuild steps in TECHNICAL.md. The workbook has every
college course by course with a link to its NIRF scorecard:
https://storage.googleapis.com/avantifellows-bq-assistant/analysis/nirf-college-employability/
Three things to know before using the workbook. “Course wise” means programme type (UG, PG),
not branch — NIRF publishes no CSE-vs-Mech split. Never sum across ranking categories: one college
appears under Engineering and Overall and University. And read from nirf_fact_master, not
nirf_fact_aggregate, which sums duplicate rows and is wrong for 29–54 institutes per year
(external_data_sources#73).