Campus placements have now become a commonplace event. Embraced as practically an entitlement, students expect to be offered jobs through the campus. But there are those who get jobs and those who don’t. It probably does more damage than justice to the students.

The moment you get a job and go out of the placement process (especially given the college’s one-job policy) you also lose the habit of studying. You reach a state of complacency and as the process of studying culminates in getting a job (as we are indoctrinated to believe so), he/she no longer has an incentive to study as diligently as before.

As it is said in the corporate world, ‘Network is your net worth’, it is only when you are out of the mindset of entitlement that you will begin to explore the opportunities available. The current trend, and what people expect, is that the B-school will facilitate the job hunting process and in the end, you will end up with one. Because of this entitlement programme, no one makes any effort to reach out to people in industry. And students are also deprived of the rich experience and knowledge sharing with the chance to know the pros and cons of the job market.

The most important shortcoming of campus placements is that they create a sense of hostility in the campus between the jobs-in-hand people and the job-seekers. Any initiative taken up during this time ends up being done by two different groups. This adds to the sense of superiority and inferiority among the students. As an individual, feeling envious of one’s own friends is the last thing anyone would want to experience.

Any way out? Can the concept of campus placements be done away with? The chances seem bleak. The stakeholders would definitely silence this proposal as the institute’s goodwill depends on the process. Year after year, the placement figures of a B-school become the determining factor whether the institute is ‘joinable’ or not.

Throughout the West, the calibre of an institute is judged by the average number of days its students take to find a job after completing the course. The best schools help the student land a job within an average 90 days. To pave the way for change to happen, it is the onus of the IITs and the IIMs to lead the change.

To bring about wider transparency in terms of the salary offered, the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, rolled out a standard measure called the Indian Placement Reporting Standards. This focuses on the maximum earning potential rather than the cost to company.

The underlying objective is to help the students get better insights about the salary offered and greater visibility in terms of his earnings. This has worked to a great extent.

reforms The IIMs and other leading institutes can bring about a wave of reform by abolishing the placement process. It is known that the IIMs charge a fee for every student that a company recruits and, in spite of these transaction costs involved, companies are still willing to allocate the required resources for the necessary talent.

The IITs and IIMs have been in existence for a good number of years and industry and society are quite aware of the kind of talent it produces. The alumni are the face of the institute and promote and preserve its brand image. Hence, abolishing placement will certainly not damage the institute’s reputation or clout in the academic world.

Rather, it would certainly get students out of their comfort zone and back in the cycle of learning. Any institute rests on three pillars — faculty, infrastructure and peer group. Once an institute has these in place it is only a matter of time before it is recognised, and placement is just one result of that recognition.

Ultimately, the objective of taking up any course is gaining knowledge in that field of study and, as a student, one should enjoy the journey of learning and not lose sight of this pursuit by being fixated on the end-product of the journey.

(The writer is a student, Great Lakes Institute of Management, Class of 2014. With inputs from Anand K.V. The views are personal.)

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