Love the disclaimer at the end of your post regarding certain industries that are especially sensitive to prestige of college name such as investment banking & management consulting.
With respect to the nation’s & to the world’s largest law firms, US News rankings of law schools are extremely important.
P.S. I will read the survey that you cited & respond further.
Regarding investment banks, management consulting and law firms, these institutions recruit from the highly ranked USNews schools because they are looking for well rounded students with high scores, etc. This allows them to charge higher fees based upon perceptions of quality and ability in working with difficult clients. College costs are rising so the rankings become even more important to parents who are making the same assessment of the whether the brand schools will make a difference in outcomes. Student to faculty ratios, graduation rates, SAT scores, average salaries, these are all factors that help parents and students assess the 4 year experience they are investing in. Deciding between Princeton, Williams, Brown or Wesleyan is not any easy task and at least the USNews rankings are a proxy for the CDS analysis which is often imprenetrable.
Correlation is not causation. HYP… may be ranked well in USNWR and may have on campus recruiters from IB/MC, but that does not mean IB/MC recruiting is primarily driven by USNWR ranking. For example, Columbia has been a top 3 ranked USNWR school in recent years, but I wouldn’t assume that makes Columbia a better choice for a student considering IB/MC than Stanford and Wharton, which haven’t ranked above Columbia in USNWR in the past 10+ years. “Elite” IB/MC is also more the exception than the rule in hiring of new grads. The overwhelming majority of industries have a completely different hiring process that is far less concerned with prestige of college name, as discussed in the earlier posts/links.
Only 2 of the 4 criteria you listed contribute significantly to USNWR ranking. Average salaries are not considered, and student/faculty ratio is only weighted at 1%. SAT scores are weighted at 5%, so they also are not a major factor in ranking. Assuming USNWR will be a good proxy for the unique assortment of factors you consider important is not a good strategy for choosing a college. If you are deciding whether to attend Princeton, Williams, Brown, and Weslayan; is it really that awkward to consider how the each of the 4 colleges does in the criteria in that is most important to you, instead of assuming your priorities will match USNWR ranking?
They’d been recruiting at these schools long before USNews started ranking colleges.
As @Publisher stated, it raises awareness of certain schools which is helpful in forming a list. We used it and several others (I personally prefer Poets & Quants) to create a list of schools that were potential fits (location, setting, size, major, etc.) It gave us a good starting point. And when you see certain schools that are highly ranked on almost all the common lists, you might as well consider them if they make your fit list.
It doesn’t mean they are “better” as really difficult to define “better”. And there’s no way to compare actual results as your kid will only go to one school. Spend the time to really drill down on fit (including expenses) and the lists will be helpful in starting the search.
Yeah, you beat me to it, @1NJParent. The big law firms, i-banks and management companies would be stunned to know their recruitment drives are based on what USNews is saying in any given year.
I think that major law firms, investment banks, & management consulting firms do recruit at schools regarded as having the most intelligent & accomplished students.
US News ranking do not change much from year-to-year so your assertion is almost meaningless, in my opinion.
US News rankings become somewhat of a self-perpetuating cycle as students strive to gain entrance to the highest ranked, most prestigious schools which also tend to offer the most generous financial aid.
Employers like to recruit efficiently so why not recruit from the schools with the top academic students ?
Additionally, many elite internships and early entry rotational positions seem to favor the top ranked schools.
Whatever criteria they use, it doesn’t make the ranking any less a subjective opinion. The only difference is that I don’t have the money to publish it in a magazine. Ranking colleges is like comparing an apple to a banana and calling one “better.” That doesn’t mean I’m supposed to cut up an apple and put it on my corn flakes. I’ll do my own thinking, thankyou! The only thing that matters is cost and preference.
Of course, much of the time, the name of your college reflects how well you did while in high school, and the name of your law school reflects how well you did while in college, in addition to cost constraints that you may have had when choosing the school.
But then the focus on college or law school prestige may have more to do with selling the consultant, banker, or lawyer to service buyers who themselves may be impressed by school prestige. I.e. it may be easier to sell a lawyer with a law degree from Harvard than one with a law degree from Arizona Summit. The law firms themselves also want to avoid commoditization of law degrees and lawyers, since law school curricula cover similar content aimed at the same professional exam and could be commoditized if the law school name were not seen as important.
My observation is that these firms do more recruiting at certain schools because they have more graduates from those same schools. The preferences are perpetuated by familiarities.
These two statements are not equivalent:
Employers generally hire based on having a good combination of skills/experience required to be successful at specific positions, not based on USNWR ranking or perception of or having the highest percentage of “top academic students”. I’m somewhat familiar with Qualcomm engineering, so I’ll use them as an example. An example entry level position for new college graduates at Qualcomm is described on their website at https://qualcomm.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/External/job/San-Diego/Hardware-Engineer---College-Graduate_3001380 . The job posting says they want applicants who have a degree in electrical or computer engineering and have the following skills/experience:
If Qualcomm wants to find quality employees for this positions, would their best bet be to go by USNWR national ranking and recruit at colleges like Harvard, Yale, and Chicago who are all relatively weak in EE and have relatively few EE grads? Or might they have far better results at a far lower recruiting/travel cost if they recruit at UCSD, which emphasizes Qualcomm tech in their EE classes more than most (perhaps all) other colleges including much of the above desired skills, has a long history of successful hires at Qualcomm, is located practically within walking distance of Qualcomm SD, and has a large number of EE graduates who are enthusiastic about living & working in the SD region?
Rather than attending a specific college, the most preferred job applicants are likely ones who have successful work experience doing something similar to the job description, preferably involving past work at Qualcomm, such as an internship. If Qualcomm knows the applicant has been successful doing something similar in a past internship, they can also be confident the applicant will be successful working full time. According to LinkedIn the colleges with the largest number of Qualcomm engineering interns were as follows, which suggests UCSD should do well in this metric as well.
Most Engineering Interns at Qualcomm’s Main Campus in SD
1 . UCSD
2. SDSU
3. USC
4. University of Mumbai
5. UCLA
If you mean only IB/MC preferred colleges and not any of the many other fields of employment, then I think there is a correlation with USNWR ranking for certain types of positions. However, this does not mean one is causing the other. For example, I suspect there is an even higher correlation with hunt’s prestigiosity rankings at Ranking Colleges by Prestigiosity than USNWR rankings. However, this does not mean IB/MC are basing their recruiting on hunt’s list from the linked post.
This also is a gross oversimplification of IB/MC hiring. Many excellent IB/MC companies also have hires and recruiting from colleges that are not ranked top USNWR, and some of such colleges have a good portion of grads entering related fields. They also hire for a variety of different types of positions, including things like engineering heavy positions, which have a very different list of favored colleges for recruiting.
Yes, when you started talking about Qualcomm, I was going to mention SDSU. Not ranked at the top of USNews, but lots of SDSU engineering students/grads interning and/or employed there.
We didn’t pay much attention to USNews but we have been looking very closely at Poets & Quants undergraduate
Business School rankings and information.
I also prefer Poets and Quants but take everything with a grain of a salt. P&Q uses a lot of data including outcomes / starting salaries, etc. However, it’s very easy to misconstrue the relevancy of these numbers. For example, If school X reports starting salaries are an average of 75k, you need to understand how that 75k is comprised. So that school may have a heavy focus on finance kids going in to banking. Nice. That doesn’t help you much if your kid is looking at marketing or advertising or whatever.
Most schools have first destination reports that will give you info on what companies hire their graduates, what roles, geography, what grad schools, etc. I would use a combination of the major rankings and the first destination reports to get a better sense of results if that matters to you.
…or maybe they’re just cheap and don’t want to pay the transportation and housing for out of state interns. Data10 is always presenting data as if it is causation and not simply correlation.
The largest employer of MBA grads announced a shift in the company’s hiring practices about one year ago.
Amazon hires approximately 1,000 newly minted MBA each year. Prior to this year, the hiring focused on what happened to be the US News highest ranked MBA programs.
Starting this year, Amazon announced that it would expand the number of schools that it recruited at for MBAs as it wanted MBAs with more technical skills & expertise. In response, many MBA programs are expanding the course offerings & adjusting course content to reflect the demand for more technically savvy MBAs & MBA candidates.
My response really had nothing to do with any data presented by anyone. It was based on my own personal observations. I’m not sure why you addressed me about a problem you have with something someone else said.
A 2017 article from P&Q at https://poetsandquants.com/2017/10/04/amazon-now-hiring-1000-mbas-a-year/ mentions Amazon was the most common employer among graduates from the following 5 MBA programs.
#23 Ranked Vanderbuilt
#19 Ranked CMU
#12 Ranked Duke
#12 Ranked Michigan
#7 Ranked Berkeley
This is not exactly suggestive of Amazon basing recruiting decisions on USNWR ranking prior to recent changes, or even of Amazon recruiting having a strong correlation with being highest USNWR ranked. In any case, the focus of this thread is undergrad and the USNWR undegrad national/LAC rankings. Some graduate/professional job positions have very different hiring practices from undergrad, and the USNWR ranking methodology is completely different for grad/professional than for undergrad national/LAC.
Location absolutely does influence recruiting activity, including cost of travel, as I mentioned in my earlier post. This is another factor that is not captured by just looking at USNWR ranking and can be an important influence on college choice. If you look at employees with “engineer” in their job title instead of “intern” the school order is extremely similar as listed below:
Most Alumni “Engineer” Job Titles at Qualcomm SD (as listed on LinkedIn)
1 . UCSD
2. SDSU
3. USC
4. Arizona State
5. Mumbai
If you have a specific post in mind, I’d be happy to address it.