| Tuesday, 02 January 2024 |
As colleges kick off the most challenging placements season in years, The Ken brings you a week-by-week account of the stakes, the jobs, the salaries, and the students at the centre of it all. 12 weeks, 12 editions—starting 5 December 2023. Subscribe here
Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Happy New Year! And welcome to edition #5 of Day Zero.
Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure.
Good ol’ Goodhart’s Law is quite apparent in what’s happening with B-school placements this season. Many years of dutifully over-indexing placement numbers and optimising for them at all costs is why we are here, a founding director of one of the newer Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) confided to me recently.
For instance, a ballpark statistic that’s come up often in my conversations with professors, students, and alumni alike is this: more than half of the graduating batch—even from the best B-schools—leave the jobs they’re placed in within the first year.
“So, what’s the point of publishing a placement report each year with such high attrition rates?” the IIM director asked. Instead, what we should be tracking is talent mobility after placements, they argued, because it could provide more useful lessons for the future.
Well, this year’s statistics in this area could be particularly… enlightening.
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