The IIT/IIM Premium Is Fading. Here's What's Replacing It.

In 2015, a product manager role at a major Indian tech company had an unwritten prerequisite: IIT for undergrad, preferably IIM or a top US school for the MBA. This wasn't a formal policy. It was the tacit filter applied by the hiring manager, endorsed by the culture, and almost never questioned.

By 2024, the same company had built two of its highest-performing product teams from people who had neither pedigree. One team lead came from a tier-3 engineering college in Rajasthan. He had shipped three successful products at a startup that no one had heard of. That portfolio mattered more than the degree.

This is not an isolated story. It's the beginning of a structural shift.

Why the Premium Existed in the First Place

The IIT/IIM premium was never really about the quality of education — though both institutions are genuinely excellent. It was about information scarcity.

Screening thousands of candidates is hard. Before skills assessments, before GitHub portfolios, before structured case studies were widely used, a degree from a known institution served as a credentialing shortcut. If someone survived JEE, they could probably handle complex technical problems. If someone cleared CAT and three rounds of case interviews at IIM-A, they were probably analytically capable and could communicate under pressure.

The credential worked because there was no better signal, or no cheaper way to access one.

What Changed

Three things happened simultaneously.

Skills became more observable. In engineering, your GitHub commit history, your contributions to open-source projects, your performance on competitive coding platforms — all of these are visible and specific in ways that a degree is not. A hiring manager at Zepto or Razorpay can assess code quality directly. They don't need a proxy.

Alternative credentials accumulated track records. The first cohort of self-taught engineers and bootcamp graduates from the early 2010s is now mid-career. Enough of them have shipped products, built teams, and delivered at scale that the alternative pathways have a visible record. The risk of hiring outside pedigree has been empirically reduced.

Startups needed to move fast. The explosion of Indian startup hiring between 2018 and 2022 put pressure on the pedigree model for a simple reason: there aren't enough IIT/IIM graduates to staff all the companies that needed talent. Companies that held out for pedigree watched candidates get hired by competitors who didn't.

The pedigree shortcut was always a proxy for quality. When better proxies became available — and when volume demands made the shortcut unaffordable — the shortcut stopped being worth its cost.

Where It's Changing Fastest

The shift is uneven. It's most pronounced in:

Product and engineering at product-first tech companies. Flipkart, Razorpay, CRED, Meesho, Zepto, and dozens of other Indian product companies have openly moved toward portfolio-first assessment. Technical interviews evaluate problem-solving on the spot. Product interviews assess actual product thinking, not educational background.

Early-stage startups. Founders hiring their first ten engineers don't have the luxury of pedigree filtering and often don't want it. They're looking for people who can build and move quickly in ambiguous conditions. The qualities that produce this aren't concentrated at IITs.

Global remote roles. Indian engineers and PMs hired by international companies — particularly in the US and EU — are increasingly assessed on async work samples, GitHub histories, and structured technical interviews. Their degree institution often doesn't register at all with foreign hiring managers who have no context for JEE rankings.

Where the Premium Still Holds

Being honest: the IIT/IIM premium is not gone. It's contracting.

In investment banking, consulting, and FMCG, the pedigree filter remains strong. Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and HUL continue to recruit heavily from a short list of institutions, and internal cultural inertia ensures this will be slow to change. A McKinsey partner hiring for a client team has her own mental model of what "caliber" looks like, and that model was shaped by her own experience of the system.

In large IT services firms (TCS, Wipro, HCL), the volume of hiring makes pedigree irrelevant in the opposite direction — they hire too many people to filter by institution, and the credential premium disappears into scale.

The contracting is most significant in the middle: growth-stage tech companies, product roles, early startup leadership, and any domain where demonstrable skill is more tractable than it was a decade ago.

What's Actually Replacing It

Three things are emerging as the new proxies:

Portfolio and demonstrated output. Not what you learned, but what you built. Products shipped, code written, analyses published, writing produced. This is hardest to fake and most directly predictive of what you'll do next.

Specific skill certifications with rigorous assessment. Not the casual kind. AWS Solutions Architect certification requires real technical knowledge and has a known failure rate. A Chartered Financial Analyst designation is hard enough that passing it means something. These credentials are gaining trust in specific domains because they have demonstrated predictive validity.

Track record at recognizable companies. This is somewhat ironic — pedigree is being replaced partly by a different kind of pedigree. But "built the growth team at Razorpay" carries genuine information in a way that a degree from a second-tier institution doesn't. The company pedigree is more current, more domain-specific, and more recent than the educational one.

The Practical Implication

If you're early in your career and didn't attend an IIT or IIM, the doors are more open than they've ever been — but they require you to build something. The absence of institutional credentialing means the absence of a shortcut. You need a portfolio. You need demonstrable skill. You need experience at companies that carry weight as professional references even if they're not household names.

If you did attend an IIT or IIM, the degree is still an asset — but it's a declining one. The candidates who will outperform you over the next decade are the ones who understood that the degree was a starting point, not a destination.

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