<p>aside from ivy's and public ivy's, what are some of the schools that offer really good networking opportunities? i know NYU is a great school for networking, for example. what do you guys think?</p>
<p>Notre Dame. Greatest alumni network in the country.</p>
<p>Penn State</p>
<p>If you follow the money, you are bound to find what you are looking for. (ie. Notre Dames, etc.)</p>
<p>Williams, Duke, Holy Cross, Colgate.</p>
<p>Penn State</p>
<p>Texas A&M for sure</p>
<p>It depends on what region you want to end up in. Texas A&M probably has a great network in the “mid South” (mostly Texas, I assume), but go up to where I am, and nadda zilch. If you know a region that you want to work/do business in, pick the big networking college there. Not many colleges besides the ones you listed have truly national alumni networks. (And I assume NYU’s mostly stay in the big urban centers, since they chose to go to college in New York.)</p>
<p>NYU is great for networking? I was not aware of that. In fact, given its weak campus culture, I would have expected the opposite, although Stern may be the exception.</p>
<p>I would expect all of the Ivies to be excellent for networking. </p>
<p>Several private universities such as Boston College, Duke, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Stanford, USC and Vanderbilt are also excellent. </p>
<p>Many elite public flagships, such as Michigan-Ann Arbor, Penn State, Texas-Austin, UNC, UVa and Wisconsin-Madison will provide excellent networking opportunities. </p>
<p>Finally, severl LACs will have strong networking cultures, but their networks will be rather small.</p>
<p>elite public schools will tend to be stronger in their regional areas of course, with a few exceptions like Michigan. There are only a handful of universities with truly national alumni networks, and those are schools that have incredible geographic diversity, ie their students truly come from all over the country. So look at a schools GEOGRAPHIC diversity if you are looking for a strong alumni network all over the country. Look at alumni giving rates. Look at the alumni clubs. Does Texas have a strong alumni club in Chicago? Does Dartmouth have a lot of grads with pull in LA? Those are the kinds of inquiries which will net you the true network powerhouses.</p>
<p>“…although Stern may be the exception.”</p>
<p>not in my experience…</p>
<p>I don’t understood this concept. Can anyone define it? How do you measure it well enough to say one school is good at it and another is not? What is a strong alumni club? </p>
<p>Say I’m lost in a foreign city, or in trouble there with the police, or homeless. Would the local Harvard Club be a good place to get help? Or is it just a good place to meet women? What if I need to borrow money under the table to pay off a judge, stuff like that? </p>
<p>So far we’ve got Texas A&M, Notre Dame, Williams, all the Ivy League Colleges, Penn State, etc., as good networking schools. What’s the common denominator? Is Cal Tech good?</p>
<p>Lirazel- You are absolutely incorrect. A&M (and similar schools) have graduated thousands and thousands of students over many years and they are ALL over the country. The alum are very loyal and will go out of their way to help other grads- not to mention the whole Corps thing. I am NOT connected to that school, so have no dog in the fight, but you don’t have much life experience yet and clearly don’t understand the reach of large universities.</p>
<p>Virginia Tech, especially the engineers</p>
<p>Schools with high alumni giving rates translate into strong alumni networks. Holy Cross, Dartmouth, Williams, Amherst, and Princeton have giving rates> 50% much higher than the best state universities. Among non Northeast schools, Duke, Stanford, and Notre Dame are great for national alumni networks.</p>
<p>USC is said to have a good network.</p>
<p>USC, especially in California.</p>
<p>par, high alumni donation rates among small private universities is the norm. Their relatively small alumni bases are easily contacted and their historic and current survival has always dependended on alumni donations. If you look at LACs, most of them have alumni donations of over 30%. That does not make their alumni networks any more effective. Large public universities have relied on state taxes and federal assistance until very recently. Only since the late 80s have they started approaching their alums. So the system of reaching out to alums for donations, and the mindset that alums should donate to their university for its survival, is not as deeply rooted as it is in smaller private universities. And then you have the issue of numbers. Public universities have alumni bodies that run in the hundreds of thousands, compared to LAC alumni bodies that number between 20,000 and 40,000.</p>
<p>An observation. Here in Chicago, being a graduate of the University of Chicago or of Northwestern, in my experience, is of no use. Suppose there is a plum job opening, but half your friends went to the U of C, and the other half to Northwestern. Just not a distinguishing characteristic at all.
Where the alumni benefit comes into play, IMO, is with liberal arts college graduates or maybe at larger schools where the graduate is seeking a job away from the beaten pack. Such as a Dartmouth grad seeking a job in Phoenix or Denver.
Of course being a graduate of a top school has currency about anywhere. But in my opinion the “network” boost is more limited than some folks suspect.</p>
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