IIT: An Over-Hyped Brand ??

“I could not make it to the IIT, my life is finished.”

“My son is a duffer. He failed in IIT. How will I face my colleagues in office now?”

Very often we hear similar or more disturbing words from people around us when the results of IITs are declared. IITs are dreams of most of the student’s right from their secondary classes. Students give up everything, sports, extracurricular activities, friends and even social life to be called as an IITian for life. Parents sacrifice their time, money and every other thing that might have even slightest probable impact on the performance of their children in the so called world’s toughest entrance exam. And then there are a lot of students who commit suicide when they fail to qualify the exam. Hey, wait, there are others too who commit suicide, this set of people are not the ones who fail to make it to an IIT, but those who crack IIT, but somehow could not do well there and resorted to suicide. Isn’t it an irony?



There is sheer obsession with IIT which has gripped every teenager dreaming of a better life style with all the comforts. It takes much more than an IIT degree to get what you actually dream of. A one day exam cannot decide how your future is going to be and what path you are going to tread the rest of your life. There are many more talented students who, for some reason or the other, cannot make it to IITs but become successful in their life.



The common phrase that we hear is that IITs are the best place to get in because out of every 200 students applying for it, less than one student gets it. About 5 lakh students fight for the exam every year out of which only 10 thousand get a seat. Sounds great! But is that the reason why IIT is the toughest exam to crack and makes every sacrifice worthwhile? I once heard that for the job of a clerk in a bank in India with 3 vacancies, there were over a thousand applications.  I once tried to enter Mumbai local teain during peak time; it was too difficult to get in as the passengers were way too huge in number. Somehow I managed to enter it. Did I achieve something great which thousand others could not? It’s just a simple result of skewed demand and supply that makes cracking an IIT a herculean task. The number of seats is very less as compared to the number of applicants because of our population and it certainly does not make IIT’s the best place to go for.



No doubt there are good professors in IIT’s and government provides various additional facilities for research and higher studies, good labs etc. to these elite institutes, but is the inability to have good professors and similar facilities in other colleges make students who study in them, inferior in any way, or are they doomed throughout the life because they did not study in an IIT. Certainly it’s not.

Getting into an IIT alone cannot make you feel secure about your future not a failure can push you towards a miserable life. Of those 10 thousand students who pass out of IIT every year, there are only a handful engineers who get hefty packages making it to the top headlines everywhere, and the whole India thinks that every IITian gets bulky packages and high profile roles. There are also a significant number of students who struggle to get a job of their own choice. A large number of IIT graduates are working in companies along with graduates from other NIT’s or other colleges and giving them competition.  It may be hard to believe, but even IIT grads keep trying to get jobs of their choice long after they have graduated.



Of the 5 lakh people who appear for it every year, it is considered that 2 out of every 3 students who cleared IIT took some tuition. If this ratio is assumed to be the same for the total number of applicants, there are about 3 lakh 30 thousand students who opt for tuitions for preparation of IIT exams, spending close to rupees 2 lakh, making the total market over Rs 600 crore. Not all parents who want their kids to study in an IIT can afford to spend this huge amount of money. Does that mean that students whose parents are not affluent and are not able to crack IIT are non deserving students?



Even after all this, if a kid is forced into an IIT because of family pressure, peer pressure or other crappy pressure of being called an IITian and all, he /she might not do well in the classroom set up and end up taking a drastic steps.

So the question is, what really makes IIT the most lucrative and most difficult college to enter. Is it the sheer name of the brand or news about some alumni playing a large role in some business or industry or just the pressure from the society. These are some of the questions which you should ask yourself before making it your dream destination and before concluding that the life ends at the closed gates of IIT’s. Maybe it is the difficulty in entrance that makes it lucrative or maybe is it lucrative so entry is difficult. But difficulty in entrance is just because of extremely high ratio of applicants to seats offered and lucrative is because of some extraordinary job offers. Both these things are not acceptable reasons for making it the ‘to be’ place for every student.

There are a number of examples of people successful in different walks of life, and they are not IITians. The Chemistry 2009 noble prize winner failed to get admission into IIT. Vinod Dham, developer of the pentium chip is not from IIT, Indira Nooyi, one of the world’s highest paid executives is not an IITian., Laxmi Mittal and Mukesh Ambani are not IITians,  Harsha Bhogle an IIM A alumnus is NOT an IITian.  K Prasanna, a 22 year old student of Kongu Engineering college, Tamilnadu who bagged a job at the Rolls-Royce, one of the major automobile manufacturers in the world, with a pay package of $92,000 per year and a student from one of the non IIT colleges getting a job package of rupee 1.3 crore from facebook are some of the numerous examples of non-IITians performing better than IITians. 

The whole point is not to demean IITs or devalue the achievements of a graduate from IIT. It’s just to make you think beyond an IIT as your dream destination. Both parents as well as students preparing for this exam must understand that it’s just an educational institution with better amenities, which our government is not able to provide in other colleges, it’s not a gateway to fame and reputation. The brand IIT is too big, but it’s not the only thing you should crave for in life. It takes much more than an IIT degree to become successful in life. Life gives lots of opportunities to do well and in the end one who keeps trying with dedicated efforts succeeds, not only the one with a degree from IIT. If you feel that you are good at something else, then go and get it, put the same amount of effort in achieving something you really are good at, rather than getting into the mad rat race because of some reasons other people think iss right. I am sure the efforts put in a correct career plan would reap much more benefits than somehow managing a seat in one of the IITs and struggling to cope up with other students doing things you don’t like to do.



Moreover, IIT is just a roadway, not a destination. The journey can be good or bad, easy or hard, choose the path carefully because in the end what really matters is the destination, not the path you tread. Instead of getting depressed over failure, look out for opportunities elsewhere and try to do well. There are now many a student opting for NITs over some not so well known IITs. Gone are the days when the IIT tag was considered to be elite. Today what recruiters are looking for is much more than this tag. A lot of good recruiters, from India and abroad, are nowadays in search of talents in other colleges in India apart from IITs. Don’t think that your dream life ends with a failure in IIT, there is a lot more around you, you just need to follow your heart and keep your eyes open. After all one exam cannot decide your future, it’s your will to succeed that decides it !!!!