‘Low placement rates in Calcutta Univ’s Economics dept for batch of 2022’

Kolkata: Calcutta University’s Economics department professor flagged low placement rate in 2023-24 compared to 2022-23. Till date, only 40 students have been placed from the department and the department has not received a single call since November 2023.

Placements for the batch of 2022 started from July-August in 2023 and continues till March-April in 2024. Thereafter, exams are usually completed by June and the selected candidates get onboard at the companies by July-August. Professor Mahalaya Chatterjee said that around 60 students usually get jobs from campus placement but this year the numbers were low. The post graduation programme of the year 2022 of CU’s Economics department has around 200 students. “We generally get analytics companies and few from development sectors as well but this year, the number of companies coming in were quite low. Bigger companies usually come in first for recruitment, taking the top lots and then smaller companies also approach. But this year, after November, we hardly got any calls. Few companies came to take the database and never reappeared,” Chatterjee said.

For the low placements, Chatterjee also highlighted that many students were unable to complete the aptitude tests of companies which turned up for placement.

She reasoned that the students, who are the 2022 batch, completed their under graduation in economics during the pandemic when the colleges were holding online classes only and examinations also had to be taken through online mode. She had recently shared on her social media feed about a company which had hired six students in 2022 and recently revoked their offer. She wrote that the company had informed the selected students that their training will start from April 15 in 2024 and ‘on-board’ in May in 2024. But on April 5 this year, they informed the students as well as the placement officer that the offer was revoked and they offered two-month’s pay as compensation.

Chatterjee’s post opened a floodgate to people sharing similar instances taking place with the students of their colleges. According to a news agency, 30-35 per cent students across Indian Institute of Technology are yet to be hired. In IIT Kharagpur, out of 2,644 who had registered in 2024, 1259 had bagged jobs by December 2023. Compared to last year, 34 per cent are left to be placed while nearly 66 per cent have been placed.