Over one-third of Indian tech workers at Zoho, Apple, NVIDIA hail from tier 3 colleges
More than one-third of Indian staff at leading technology companies graduated from lower-ranked institutions, according to a Wednesday report from Blind. The anonymous workplace platform surveyed 1,602 professionals and found firms like Zoho, Apple, NVIDIA, SAP, and PayPal employed about 34 percent from tier 3 colleges based on NIRF 2025 rankings. These employers prioritize technical abilities over academic pedigree when making hiring decisions.
Traditional finance and established tech corporations such as Goldman Sachs, Visa, Atlassian, Oracle, and Google still favor campus recruitment, with only 18 percent of their workers coming from tier 3 schools. Most tier 1 and tier 2 alumni credit campus placement programs for career advancement, while 59 percent of tier 3 graduates view their degrees as resume fillers. About 74 percent of lower-tier alumni said education helped only at the career start or provided no benefit at all.
