<p>Look at a catalog of jobs. Find a major associated with the job you want. Look at colleges that offer the major.
If you are undeclared, find a college with the most majors in more fields so you can have a wider range of choices when you do decide.
Sort by graduation rates. Then sort by employment rates out of college. Collegeboard and other sites does that. Then sort by price.</p>
<p>“Sort by graduation rates. Then sort by employment rates out of college. Collegeboard and other sites does that. Then sort by price.”</p>
<p>RANKINGS!</p>
<p>haha (10 char)</p>
<p>lol =) </p>
<p>Some jobs are easier to get if you go to higher-ranked colleges. For example, the most sought-after banking and consulting jobs were dominated by graduates from a few schools; an econ major from a top-5 school has more access to these jobs than an econ major from a second tier one. Even if the second tier school has a similar post-grad employment rate, it doesn’t mean they’re getting the same positions. </p>
<p>To take an extreme example, if you wanted to be a professional physicist (a highly competitive occupation that clearly draws largely from physics and math majors), that decision rule would lead you to matriculate at Holy Cross (higher graduation rate) or Covenant College (a US News fourth-tier Christian liberal arts college with a lower tuition) over MIT or Caltech. At some level, academic reputation matters.</p>
<p>sure but the question is, what is the difference between schools ranked 1-5 and 6 - 15? Is there a difference in employer perception or does it simply come down to the individual?</p>
<p>BTP, why do you comment on cornell and yale’s page? You go/went to USC, stick with what you know.</p>
<p>First of all, rankings threads only result in useless arguments and weirdos like BTP pretending to know more than they really do.
What was your purpose in creating this thread in the first place? Why don’t you go post those rankings in every single school forums on that list?
Then you just might be famous.</p>
<p>Ok don’t get mad at the OP. He/she was just disemminating information - what people do with it is entirely out of his/her control.</p>
<p>Why the hell is Penn tied with stanford? Wharton doesn’t even have that many people, and non-wharton penn…</p>
<p>who knows - but I was doing some research and former Vice Provost Biddy Martin made a good point - US News is exclusively about inputs, and unfortunately Cornell’s dual mission, that of an Ivy League and Land Grant school makes it difficult for us to do the things that our peers do. However, that being said, as the youngest Ivy and one of the best universities in the world, I don’t think we should give a ranking that tries to quantify educational quality that much credence. We’re smarter than that.</p>
<p>just my 2 cents</p>
<p>In case you weren’t aware, peer review is the LEAST meaningful (and most important) factor in the rankings. University presidents are given a list of 5 colleges/universities they should assign a 1-5 rank to. There really is no guarentee that the president who rates Cornell knows more about/has the same scale as the president who rates Duke/WashU/Penn/Northwestern/Rice etc. It’s entirely arbitrary.</p>
<p>If you want to take pride in the fact that people whose job it is to take care of their own university think yours is pretty cool, then go for it. I’ll be the one actually looking at objective data to rank universities.</p>