<p>And even if you go to the QS world university rankings and Times higher education rankings, and rank universities based on employ-ability in Engineering, Georgia Tech will place below much less qualified universities. How is this possible? Given that Georgia Tech ranks higher in other areas. Thank you.</p>
<p>This is not a very reliable survey. It was conducted by a French firm and seems to have very odd results. Employer ratings are often questionable. According to the Businessweek ranking of undergraduate business programs, Wharton’s employer rating was 30th. It was published in two consecutive years, and the fluctuations were alarming. Clearly, their methodology and data mining leaves much to be desired.</p>
<p>Since we don’t know what type of skillsets these companies were looking for these rankings are pretty meaningless. If these companies were looking primarily for engineers, engineering-strong schools will be ranked highly, and schools like Harvard would be ranked lower.</p>
<p>Honestly, I can’t stand rankings like this… without context, they are completely pointless.</p>
<p>Not only is it meaningless in general, it’s meaningless because the top 20 firms are going to be very disparate in what they want. A tech and computing firm is going to want a very different type of student than a publishing company, who is going to want someone different than an educational research company.</p>
<p>Personally I think that the college industry (and, to a certain extent, the grad industry) is way too focused on rankings - to the point that many organizations that do completely different things have published questionable “rankings” of schools without revealing their methodology or how they came about the absolute numbers. Realistically, most American students (engineers or no) are not going to be competing with students from Peking University or Edinburgh - or even Cambridge - much less students from Bucconi University in Italy or Lund in Sweden. And some of the absolutely top research universities in the U.S. are ranked well below places like this.</p>
<p>I completely agree. It’s like ranking doctors without considering their specializations… or restaurants without considering the type of food served. </p>
<p>Here’s the 2013 ranking by current world ranking, current U.S. ranking, and 2012 world ranking (respectively):</p>
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<p>There are several +30 jumps just as in the previous years. This can be seen in schools like JHU, Cornell, Carneggie Mellon, UCSF, BYU, UW, tOSU, UCSD, Rice, and Purdue. I think what’s more interesting than the big jumps are schools that stayed in the same or similar places, like Michigan and Vanderbilt.</p>
<p>And again, I think this ranking’s wild fluctuations are a little to ridiculous to be taken seriously. The accompanying ‘ideal graduate / ideal university’ is pretty ridiculous too:</p>