<p>I live in Chicago, however I'd like to live either in CA or FL.</p>
<p>What do you think?</p>
<p>When employers visit university career centers, they visit:</p>
<p>A. Local universities.
B. High reputation universities that they have to travel to.</p>
<p>For example, a “Silicon Valley” computer company may travel to MIT, CMU, UIUC, UT Austin, UCLA, USC, and other high reputation universities in CS, while recruiting locally at SJSU and UCSC as well as Berkeley and Stanford (which have the double advantage of being local and having high reputation).</p>
<p>In this CS example, if you stay in Illinois, UIUC will likely get more visits from out of area companies than ISU, IIT, UIC, etc…</p>
<p>Yes and no. I for one don’t give it a priority when choosing a college but I still take it into consideration.</p>
<p>Yes. A good example is Northwestern:
Almost half of the graduating class will stay in Chicago/Greater Chicago after graduating while only 7 percent will be going to New York and 2.5% to Los Angeles (last page).
[Northwestern</a> University Graduation Survey Results 2009](<a href=“http://issuu.com/northwesternucs/docs/2009_graduation_report_for_employers/1]Northwestern”>Northwestern University Graduation Survey Results 2009 by Northwestern University Career Services - Issuu)</p>
<p>It will be harder to get jobs from half way across the nation because during career fairs, the banks/businesses are probably recruiting for their local branches. There will probably be less of an alumni base as well. In addition, why would a company travel far away if they have a great school just around the corner? Unless you go to a very highly ranked institution.</p>
<p>It depends on the school and the field. Most of the top 50 or so private universities and LACs attract students from all over the country. Typically, only about 25% of them are from the state where the school is located; 5-10% are internationals. These schools don’t offer business, nursing, pharmacy, or agriculture majors. They provide liberal arts and science education for the national and global economy. Many graduates enter fields that are not closely tied to local markets, such as academia, applied science research, medicine, government and diplomacy, or international finance and trade.</p>
<p>Public universities answer to taxpayers in each state. The flagship schools, especially, cover the same areas that private schools do. However, they also provide pre-professional training in fields that are more or less tied to local and regional markets. An ag school in Vermont probably won’t offer much training in range management for beef cattle ranching. A local accounting firm that serves small business needs has no incentive to recruit in distant states.</p>
<p>However, many global companies do recruit heavily at large public universities. Some of the best undergraduate business programs are at large public universities such as Berkeley, Michigan, UVa, UNC, and UT-Austin. I have not seen the data but would be surprised if many graduates of these schools did not take jobs out of state.</p>
<p>If you want to work in California someday, I’d strongly recommend Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech and Claremont Colleges, and mildly recommend UCLA and USC over UofChicago.</p>
<p>It depends on the major. For business or accounting this is true. For creative writing not so much. It also depends on the level of the job. For companies like Google that only recruit the tippy-top CS majors, the recruiting takes place at the top CS universities. However, there are lots of programming jobs in companies around the country that are most likely filled from local graduates. For a profession like acting, it pays to be close to the areas where the auditions are conducted because acting is as much about finding work as it is about going to school. If you want theater in NYC then you need to be within a train ride of auditions. For LA screen tests, it’s useful to be in SoCal. However, casting directors also travel to top drama schools like CMU.</p>
<p>Only if you are an average student.</p>