<p>Too many factors go into this equation- the region, the industry, the company, the person, the major, work experience, coop or internships, and on and on. And of course the difference that colleges make are grossly overrated, especially by students. </p>
<p>Just on a lark, here are 3 grabbed-out-of-a-long-list of schools (unnamed here) and I cut and pasted data I found about them. Picked one that is considered 'high rank", one considered ‘middling’ and one considered ‘low ranked’. The letter I assigned isn’t relevant. These were the ‘major employers’ recruiting from them. </p>
<p>And before you feel a need to thrash around the weakness of the ‘data’, I concede it’s not a scientific test. I offer it simply as an example, to illustrate that at almost any organization (and any graduate school, for that matter), you will find a wide swath of people who came from a wide range of undergraduate universities. This is because the particular ‘rank’ of your undergraduate college is only one of many factors (if a factor at all) that go into where you end up, and some rightfully argue its a small factor compared to many other more important ones.</p>
<p>School A
Deloitte Touche Tomatsu
Ernst & Young
KPMG LLP
Bank of America Corp.
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Sears Holdings
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Target Corp.
Philip Morris
HSBC</p>
<p>School B
Credit Suisse Group
Citigroup Inc.
Bank of America Corp.
JPMorgan Chase & Co.
ccenture
BlackRock
Moelis & Co.
Rosetta
Capital One
Deutsche Bank AG
American Express
Microsoft
UBS
Ernst & Young</p>
<p>School C
KPMG LLP
Deloitte Touche Tomatsu
Bank of America Corp.
Ernst & Young
General Electric
PricewaterhouseCoopers
Target Corp.
Wells Fargo
Yahoo
Hewlett-Packard
Microsoft
State Farm
TD Financial</p>
<p>Nobody is saying that they had to do so. This thread is about how employers view schools, not how graduate programs view schools. </p>
<p>Yet the bottom line is that they had to meet at Stanford (for grad school) to launch the company. If they had not met at Stanford - i.e. if Brin had stayed at Michigan for grad school and Page at Maryland - Google would most likely never have been founded. </p>
<p>On the other hand, if they had met as Stanford undergrads, Google might have been founded earlier. After all, Facebook - Google’s great nemesis - was founded by a trio of Harvard undergrads.</p>
But there’s a clear connection. If you can attend U Maryland for UG and then found Google, the intermediate steps aren’t really relevant when deciding on a course of action for undergrad education.</p>
<p>Of course, this is assuming that big-name tech startups represent a valid way of measuring employability. I don’t think they do. No matter what school you attend, your odds of founding the next Google are really very low. That’s like saying that Purdue is the best school for would-be astronauts because it has so many astronaut alums. 22 astronauts, while impressive, is such a small proportion of the students Purdue has graduated over the years that it says nothing about your chances of becoming one yourself.</p>
<p>@starbright: Is that data from the individual institutions? If so, did they follow the same methodology?</p>
<p>It should be noted that Stanford provided seed funding for Google in exchange for (potential) stock should the company ever go public. At the time, Stanford had no way of knowing that the company would be so successful, let alone go public. But Stanford nurtures the entrepreneurial spirit in its students like no other school in America.</p>
<p>I am VERY familiar with P&G in the course of what I do for a living. Like most big companies of that nature, they will choose a handful of schools to recruit from, that may represent different selectivity levels – and then within those, they make absolutely no distinction between those schools. They choose those schools not because they think they are the absolute very best per USNWR or another standard – they choose those schools based on long-standing relationships, locality relative to where their jobs are, and where they’ve had success in the past. The college students who incessantly ask about whether their 3.6 at Harvard will trump the 3.8 at a “lesser” school miss the point. If the company is interviewing at both of those schools, they will consider them equally as candidates for the position. No company chooses to recruit at several schools and then, after having completed the interviews, puts one of the schools above the other in terms of selection. If the company isn’t interviewing at both of those schools, then it’s a moot question.</p>
<p>The absolute # of college grads who desire to work for McKinsey (et al) is low. You seem to forget that there are people with majors and interests other than business.</p>
<p>Exactly. The only thing I’d add is that maybe the company might add on a few other schools not in the geographical area because the school has a special program, or some hotshot at the company went there and likes to go back to the college for the recruiting process. Or if the company has offices in various locations, they will often choose colleges near those locations. The college students who think that big companies actually are looking at or care about USNWR are completely misguided.</p>
<p>In fact, it is possible that a 3.0 from DePaul might beat a 3.8 from DePaul if he exhibits other signs of what it takes to be successful in business or other types of jobs.</p>