<p>i’m an international student seeking for an admission to US tech colleges.</p>
<p>do employers depend on US news rankings a lot?</p>
<li><p>if there are 2 equally competent fresh engineering graduates to choose from, say one is from university X and the other is from university Y. Given that university X is ranked just slightly higher (maybe the difference is just 4 or 5 places) in the rankings. which one will he choose?</p></li>
<li><p>again, 2 equally smart fresh tech graduates from Dartmouth and UIUC. which one will he choose?</p></li>
</ol>
<p>There are definitely “elite” engineering jobs that go to grads of top schools. It’s not broken down by company, it’s jobs within companies.</p>
<p>Keep in mind that going to school in the US does not mean you can stay there to work after you graduate. This is something I’m not sure why many internationals don’t understand. So the most important thing is how the degree is seen in your country.</p>
<p>Use the search function to find several threads on the subject of international’s limitations in staying in the US.</p>
<p>I don’t think that a few spots on any rankings lists are going to severely influence an employer, especially if we are talking about engineering related jobs. If you are trying to differentiate between top engineering programs, do so by things other than rankings, e.g. location, culture, etc. I will say that I think the job opportunities may vary in some ways, an example would be one that you cited. Going to Dartmouth is going to offer you opportunities in fields like consulting or even banking along with engineering jobs. However, a school like UIUC is going to offer more opportunities in heavy engineering industries. I would say that if you plan on working in industry as an engineer, UIUC is probably a better program to go with as it’s known primarily for engineering. Dartmouth, while a very good school in almost all aspects, is not necessarily known for engineering. Go look at the different schools’ career websites and check out their career fair pages, they should give you a better insight as to which companies recruit from the respective programs.</p>
<p>PS
hmom does have a good point about the international student thing. At Purdue, there are literally thousands of international students, and most of them are in engineering here. To say the least, the jobs available for international students are slim. Unless you are one of the top students at the school, it will be very hard to find a job in the US. So, it is a good point to take into consideration the reputation of the school in your country.</p>
<p>I think the only rankings that matter are really tiers, not a difference of 5 ranks in US news. For the sake of argument, if US news ranks MIT as #1 for electrical engineering and Berkeley as #5, would employers hire the MIT grad over the Berkeley grad just because it’s #1? Also, asking hypothetical questions that starts with “if two grads are equally competent” is useless. I can’t imagine two candidates who are identical in every aspect. There’s more to life than academic accomplishments.</p>
<p>UIUC if you want to be an actual engineer at a place like Boeing. Dartmouth if you want to go into finance, consulting, or venture capital using your engineering degree.</p>
<p>For employers it is all about name recognition and geography. If the school is local or they have a good track record with its graduates, they will probably recruit there. If an applicant went to a school they’ve heard of they will assume he got a good education. If an applicant went somewhere like Rose-Hulman or Harvey Mudd or Olin that they may not have heard of, the applicant may have to waste interview time responding to questions like “is that a good school”. I had this problem even though the school was a top-40 school and located only three miles from the hotel the interview was at. Perhaps if your school is one or two hundred years old, even if it isn’t ranked in the top 100 or particularly known for that major, the interviewer would grant you points for that just because he’d heard of it. Often the interviewer is a manager or a human resources person who has no idea of what the actual current rankings are anyway.</p>
<p>In my experience, employers also heavily weight based on the success of past graduates form that school. For example, if a company hires 10 MIT grads, and they all perform poorly (not likely, but possible), then that company might stop hiring at MIT. Similarly, if the same company hires 10 people from Virginia Tech, and they’re all excellent, the company will probably increase their effort at VaTech. </p>
<p>A good example is Colorado School of Mines. Someone in another thread quoted them as the #50 undergraduate school for Chemical Engineers. However, my last employer had a very good track record from that school, and so we actually recruited it more heavily than Stanford (which had a poor track record - not because the engineers were bad, but because they tended to quit after a few years to go back to school).</p>
<p>The experiences will therefore be company specific, and you have no way of knowing it before hand for a given company. The best way to evaluate who hires from where is to ask for the hiring statistics from Career Services. They should, at minimum, tell you starting salaries and job offers / student for your intended major and degree. They may also give you a list of top hiring companies.</p>
<p>Edit: But where do they start their search (before they have any experience)? First at local schools, then at the schools where the executives went, then at the Top 10 or so schools. In my experience, most companies start there, then drop off school and move down the list. So, I guess rankings matter from that standpoint.</p>
<p>“For employers it is all about name recognition and geography. If the school is local or they have a good track record with its graduates, they will probably recruit there.”</p>
<p>I agree 100% with this. I go to a public university that probably isn’t in the top 100 engineering schools in the country, but our graduates keep on landing nice positions in highly sought after companies because of the quality of work our graduates deliver.</p>
<p>How about this situation? I’m probably going to go to Minnesota-Twin Cities. They’re ranked top 4 or 5 in chemical engineering nationwide (my intended major). Would an employer out east or west know this? I don’t want to be restricted to the Midwest in a job search.</p>