A peek into the kind of salaries students at Kolkata’s Indian Statistical Institute (ISI) are being offered clearly makes it a mere myth.

The maximum salary a student gets is Rs 13 to 14 lakh per annum and the average is about Rs 7.5 lakh, said Bimal Roy, Dean of the Studies. He was speaking on the sidelines of the institute’s 42nd convocation.

By now almost all 110 students of the 2007-08 batch numbering have been picked up by companies with similar pay packages barring two students of MSQE.

Four students from different courses have opted out of the placement procedure to pursue a career in academics.

The companies require students with great mathematical and statistical skills to handle large data, the ISI authorities said.

The steep rise in salaries of students has started taking place in the past couple few years, the an institute official said. In 2004-05, the maximum a student could get was about Rs 8 lakh and a little over Rs 4 lakh.

The most sought after course of India’s premier research institute is the Master in Statistics (M Stat) programme, followed by Master in Quantitative Economics (MSQE), M Tech in Computer Science and MTech in Quality, Reliability and Operations Research.

“At present, a large number of investment banking firms like Lehman Brothers, McKinsey, Morgan Stanley and J P Morgan are hiring students of MStat in the actuarial (insurance) sector,” Roy said.

Roy explains that about five years back, an M Tech in Computer Science, the most sought-after course, fetched the highest salary by software companies. The pay-package in the software sector has surged to Rs 5 lakh per annum but there has also been a steep rise for students of MStat and MSQE courses, he added.