I am a former faculty of one of the old IITs. I would refrain from revealing the exact IIT and the department.
BITS Pilani can be a choice which students prefer mainly because of good placements, alumni network. It gets some of the brightest minds of India indeed. But, the academic environment, it is no match even to a new IIT. Let me explain.
An institution can be considered great when most of their faculty went on to have their highest degrees from places better than itself and returned to serve there. You can find a lot of faculty from top US universities, old IITs and IISc even in new IITs. But at BITS everyone are majorly from BITS itself or some NIT or at the bestcase, some IIT. This is clearly not a good sign in terms of quality of faculty and academic environment.
As a person who is very closely linked to academia, I can confidently say BITS is just resting on its past laurels, when even the new IITs and old IITs are pacing way ahead of BITS in terms of education quality. If you’re someone placement oriented, the placements at BITS is certainly better than many new IITs and this is something which is rapidly changing given the academic environment at even the new IITs. But as a person from academia, placements are not the only way I evaluate an institution.