<p>Does anyone know why? Is the "C" grade accurate, and what does Wash U's "Job Placement Grade" getting a C actually MEAN in terms of people being able to find jobs?</p>
<p>Business Week is the People magazine of the business world. Forbes is like the US Weekly of the business world :p</p>
<p>Rankings are a good start to refine your schools, but at most Top 20 programs you’re probably going to find pretty similar characteristics. Magazines need to sell copies, and things change from year to year so that they will sell more copies. </p>
<p>These are actual statistics on Wash U’s undergrad business school career placement directly from the business school’s website:
<a href=“http://www.olin.wustl.edu/Documents/AnnualReportBSBA.pdf[/url]”>http://www.olin.wustl.edu/Documents/AnnualReportBSBA.pdf</a></p>
<p>Those statistics speak for themselves, in a good way.</p>
<p>I think at business schools, so many people expect to get a job automatically after graduation simply because they went to Harvard/Wharton/etc. And that is true for some schools – the NAME alone will get you in the door at many companies. At Wash U, the name is solid. However, it doesn’t have the same cachet as “Wharton”, and as a result you actually need to WORK HARD and DO WELL to get a good job. That’s just the real world anyway. People who gave Wash U a “C” in career services were probably those kids who didn’t do much work and therefore didn’t get a job b/c they expected to rely on reputation alone. Provided you actually work hard, do well, and take advantage of career advising at Wash U, you’ll probably be more valued by companies anyway. Just because it got a “C” in career services in one single year alone doesn’t mean that companies don’t recruit here or that you won’t be successful.</p>
<p>If you look those statistics in Wash U’s report, you’re going to find the same companies at Wash U and other top schools, same starting salaries, and same industries.</p>
<p>One thing that is interesting… if you re-order the Business Week ranking table by certain variables (Student/Faculty Size, Average SAT Score, Starting Salary, Teaching Quality, and MBA Feeder Rank), Wash U is in the top 5 for all of them! Very interesting that Wash U is actually the #1 school for MBA Feeder School.</p>
<p>I do realize that businessweek isn’t accurate about everything, but I’m still confused as to why Wash U got a “C” in that category. I don’t think it’s as simple as “because Wash U isn’t a well-known school so you don’t have to work hard in order to get a job”, because out of the top 50 undergrad business programs, only 5 of them have a “C” in the Job Placement category, and Wash U is one of them.</p>
<p>is this ranking thing also related to Engineering as well?</p>
<p>@Maak</p>
<p>No. Olin is the b-school.</p>