Saurabh got into IIT Bombay at seventeen. IIM Ahmedabad at twenty-one. McKinsey at twenty-three. By twenty-five he was earning more than both his parents combined ever had. By thirty-two he was in a corner office. By thirty-five he was wondering when exactly his life had stopped feeling like his own.
The pipeline worked. It did exactly what it was designed to do. It converted a JEE rank into a placement package into a trajectory that was legible, prestigious and lucrative. What it also did, with the efficiency of a system that has been optimised over decades, was narrow the definition of success to a single corridor.
IIT-IIM graduates in India don’t just earn well. They earn a specific kind of well. Consulting. Investment banking. Product management at a global tech company. GCC leadership. These are the approved exits. Saurabh’s batchmate who left McKinsey to run a pottery studio in Pondicherry is discussed in alumni WhatsApp groups with a mixture of admiration and concern. The admiration is for the courage. The concern is that it might be contagious.
The pipeline doesn’t fail. It succeeds so thoroughly that leaving it feels like a malfunction rather than a choice.
Research from Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Insights project shows that elite institutions create strong income premiums in the first decade after graduation. After the first decade, the premium stabilises while the identity lock-in continues. You’re no longer earning more because of the degree. You’re earning more because you made choices the degree made available. The degree opened doors. It also made it psychologically harder to walk through any door that the degree didn’t open.
The specific Indian layer: IIT-IIM credentials function as caste markers in corporate India. They signal cognitive ability, work ethic and social capital. Walking away from the pipeline means walking away from a social sorting mechanism that provides access, respect and a narrative your parents can share at gatherings. Saurabh’s pottery-studio batchmate is happy. His parents have stopped mentioning him at family dinners.
Saurabh is still at his firm. He’s also started teaching a weekend data science class that he finds more fulfilling than anything he’s done in ten years. He hasn’t left the corridor. He’s opened a door in the wall that wasn’t on the original blueprint.
If you removed the brand from your degree, would the career you’re in still be the career you’d choose?
Saurabh’s pipeline worked perfectly. The question is whether perfect was the same as right. careers.deliberx.com