Competitive programming at a private college — is the time investment worth it?

Let me give you the answer upfront: it depends entirely on what you want from it, and most people asking this question haven't been honest with themselves about the answer.

I did competitive programming from 5th semester to 7th semester. 300+ problems on Codeforces and LeetCode combined. My rating peaked at Codeforces 1450 (Specialist). I'll tell you what that did and didn't do for my career.

What it did: my DSA fundamentals are genuinely solid. I can reason about time complexity intuitively. In placement interviews, I'm comfortable with medium-hard problems and I don't panic when I see a problem I haven't seen before.

What it didn't do: it didn't get me a better offer than my friend who did zero CP but built 3 real projects and had a proper system design understanding. He got Deloitte USI at 10 LPA in the same drive where I got Hexaware at 8 LPA.

Do CP if you genuinely enjoy it. Don't do CP as a career strategy if you don't enjoy it and your target companies don't require it — you'll burn 18 months of productive time on something that returns less than a well-chosen internship.