Survey Finds One-Third of Apple, Nvidia Employees in India are Graduates of Tier-3 Colleges

A new survey has revealed that tech giants like Apple, Nvidia and Zoho are increasingly hiring graduates from India’s lesser-known educational institutions.

According to the survey conducted by workplace community app Blind, around 34 per cent, or one in three, employees at these companies in India said they had graduated from Tier-3 colleges. These institutions fall outside the country’s premier engineering and management schools, such as the IITs, IIMs and IISc.

The survey, which polled 1,602 Indian professionals between 17 and 24 September this year, sought to understand how a person’s educational background impacts career progression in the technology sector. The respondents included employees from major companies such as Zoho, Apple, Nvidia, SAP and PayPal. A large share of professionals said that their college background had little to no bearing on their professional growth.

As per the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2025, the survey divided colleges into four categories – Tier 1 (IITs, IISc, top IIMs and BITS Pilani), Tier 2 (NITs, DTU, Jadavpur University, and others), Tier 3 (state and private universities) and Tier 4 (foreign institutions).

The findings suggest that students who do not enter elite universities can still carve out successful careers in global technology firms. While companies like Goldman Sachs and Visa continue to favour graduates from top-ranked institutions, the survey indicates that leading tech employers increasingly value skills over degrees.

The report comes amid growing unease in the job market, especially within the technology industry, which is undergoing large-scale restructuring due to AI-led automation.

Interestingly, 59 per cent of professionals from Tier-3 colleges and 45 per cent from Tier-4 colleges said that their alma mater was “just another line on a résumé.” Meanwhile, graduates from Tier-1 and Tier-2 institutions were more likely to attribute their career success to campus placements and institutional reputation.

Traditional multinational companies such as Goldman Sachs, Visa, Oracle, Atlassian and Google still rely heavily on campus recruitment. Yet, even among these employers, an average of 18 per cent of employees reported graduating from Tier-3 colleges, highlighting the gradual shift toward merit and skill-based hiring.

Notably, the survey also challenges the perception that elite degrees guarantee better pay. Only 15 per cent of Tier-3 college graduates said their education provided significant benefits, while 74 per cent of all respondents noted that the prestige of their college mattered only in the early phase of their careers, or not at all. Even among overseas graduates, 53 per cent said that their college background had little impact on their earnings.

These findings align with a recent Forbes analysis, which reported that over 90 per cent of employers achieve better recruitment outcomes when they focus on skills rather than academic qualifications, a trend that appears to be reshaping hiring practices across the global tech industry.