B-School placements at 8-year high despite covid-19 disruptions

NEW DELHI: Placement of India’s management school graduates touched an eight-year high in 2019-20 despite the covid-19 pandemic impacting the last part of the academic year.

The 2019-20 placement numbers indicate that companies honoured many of their job offers to management graduates, despite a tough economic environment. B-Schools managed to find replacement jobs when some of their students faced difficulties in joining the companies due to business loss.

As per fresh official data, B-Schools across India placed at least 115,481 graduating management students in 2019-20 against the enrollment of 237,000 of the same batch in 2018-19 academic year. In 2018-19, B-Schools placed around 115,400 students, according to official data reviewed by Mint.

This data was from over hundreds of non-IIM business schools. IIMs, because of their brand and quality, had already said that they had a good year of campus hiring. IIMs are autonomous and do not fall under the purview of All Indian Council of Technical Education (AICTE), professional education regulator.

Though the placement of B-School graduates hovered around 49% of those enrolled, hiring trend shows a continuous growth, according to official data by AICTE.

The number can be interpreted in two ways. One, almost 50% could not land a job during campus hiring, a traditional debate on subdued employment environment and quality of employable graduates in the country. Two, the 2019-20 numbers are still highest since 2012 when AICTE started capturing hiring numbers from management schools in a structured way.

“The number could have been much higher this time provided that the pandemic was not there. Still an improvement than last year is a positive sign,” said a government official who declined to be named. "There were reports of companies not honouring some offers initially, but it seems the institutions and students did find replacement offers – the salary must have got compromised a bit though. While the situation in leading B-Schools were as per the trend, it may not be same for across the table and some dependent on local industrial clusters may have got impacted."

In Haryana and Tamil Nadu, the cumulative hiring numbers for the 2020 pass- out batch were marginally less than 2019 numbers.

“B-School placement was looking up before pandemic hit the country. Management students hiring across cities would have easily gone up around 15%-20% had businesses not got impacted adversely. Similarly the salary would have also perked up but then the economy got the hit,” said J.K. Das, director of Fore School of Business, a leading private management school in New Delhi.

Das said his school and schools like his completed the placement process ahead of the national lockdown and it helped them. “Yes, some companies deferred the joining date of some of the students but we were in touch with companies and did not face any challenge here. When you have a long term relationship with recruiters, it does help,” he added.