Millions of young people aim for these high-flying courses, sometimes at great sacrifice. But once they’ve earned their degrees, they head abroad in droves, particularly to the United States.
A report from the National Bureau of Economic Research has sought to quantify this phenomenon by studying the careers of graduates from prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), which train the best engineers on the subcontinent.
There are 23 such institutions across India, including the coveted IITs in Delhi, Madras and Kharagpur.
In a country with a population of 1.4 billion, over 40% of which is under the age of 25, only a handful join these elite engineering schools.
In 2010, nearly 450,000 applicants competed for fewer than 10,000 places, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The success of many executives of Indian origin in Silicon Valley, the global cradle of tech, highlights the prowess of these higher education establishments.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, and Parag Agrawal, ex-boss of Twitter, studied at one of the country’s 23 IITs, as did Shantanu Narayen and Satya Nadella, heads of Adobe and Microsoft.
But they are not the only ones to have left India once they have trained in one of these renowned institutions.
According to a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 62% of Indians who finished in the top 100 of the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) – the entrance exam common to all IITs – left India after graduating in engineering. More than a third (36%) of the students ranked in the JEE top 1,000 did the same.
The lure of USA
The vast majority of Indian graduates from IITs choose to move to the US to pursue a master’s degree or doctorate (65%). In comparison, only 5% move to the UK after completing their engineering studies.
The expatriation of young IIT graduates across the Atlantic is facilitated by intergenerational solidarity between alumni.
For example, “alumni networks can lower the costs of migration for IIT students by providing information about educational and employment opportunities.
Alumni may also facilitate access to particular programs where they have influence over admissions or hiring decisions,” reads the National Bureau of Economic Research report.
Indian tech companies are trying to convince IIT graduates to stay in their home country by recruiting them directly from campus, with attractive salaries on offer.
But not all Indians graduating from these elite academic institutions are so lucky: only 5.5% of them earned an annual salary in excess of five million rupees (around US$60,700) in 2022, according to The Tribune India. All the more reason for IIT graduates to see if the grass isn’t greener elsewhere.