<p>A couple of months ago, one poster on this forum claimed that UChicago graduates, somehow, "cannot find good jobs". He based his claim on a single ranking, which showed that there are fewer alums from UofC undergrad in Wharton's Facebook group than from other institutions. (That was a totally laughable ranking.)</p>
<p>Another poster effectively debunked his bogus claim using stats from The Daily Beast. These numbers indicate the average proportion of undergraduates employed one year after graduation. Evidently, UChicago does exceptionally well in job placement.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Harvard University - 90%
Columbia University - 89%
Stanford University - 86%
University of Chicago - 86%
Princeton University - 84%
University of Pennsylvania - 82%
Carnegie Mellon - 79%
University of Maryland - College Park - 76%
University of Virginia - 76%
Cornell University - 75%
University of California - Davis - 74%
Duke University - 73%
University of California - Berkeley - 74%
Yale University - 71%
University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign - 70%
University of Michigan - Ann Arbor - 70%
UCLA - 71%
MIT - 68%
Boston University - 63%
California Institute of Technology - 60%
New York University - 59%
Northwestern University - 56%
[/quote]
</p>
<p>There were other posters who offered equally compelling evidence that effectively refuted the troll's baseless claim, but he took every reasonable argument with a grain of salt and rambled on, and on, and on...</p>
<p>The New York Times recently published an article, titled "Gauging the Value of Your M.B.A.". </p>
<p>There is a multimedia graph embedded in the article, which generates a list of universities, 150 institutions to be exact, with the world's highest overall employability. It is important to note that while the article is about M.B.A. admissions, the list is not limited to a specific field of employment. It is not limited to, say, the business profession for example. (Maybe that is why Penn is ranked so low on it.) I hope this study will put any doubts about UofC alums' job prospects to rest.</p>
<p>I am not too sure about the conclusion one may draw from this list! I have had the opportunity to work in Asia, Europe and the USA. Each geographical area has its own favorites:) While recruiting MBAs, the three names that will attract immediate attention, across the business capitals of the world are Harvard,Stanford, and Wharton. Why? You may have n number of explanation for it , but that is the current scenario! I wouldn’t give too much attention to such lists.</p>
<p>What’s so good about Harvard? In my honest opinion, Harvard really isn’t “all that.” I think Harvard is ranked so high because of their prestige from back-in-the-day.</p>
<p>The list isn’t too bad. UCLA seems to be an anomaly and Penn is ranked too low. Otherwise, it might be spot down. It’s impressive how well Brown and Princeton do without have business schools.</p>
<p>Although I realize this thread is old and am reluctant to revive it, I’m pretty sure the data in the first post is substantially incorrect. The OP states job placement one year after graduation is
</p>
<p>Yet an examination of the actual data <a href=“Home | CareerAdv”>Home | CareerAdv; and <a href=“http://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/graduation10.pdf[/url]”>http://gecd.mit.edu/sites/default/files/graduation10.pdf</a> suggests a very different picture. According to the University of Chicago data close to 86% of students were in graduate school or had a full-time job 10 months after graduation so the OP’s figure is pretty reasonable if you count being in graduate school as job. The MIT data suggested that about 90% of students either had jobs or were enrolling in graduate school at graduation. It seems likely that the 90% figure could have only risen in the year after graduation. The conclusion is that while the OP’s data suggests the University of Chicago has significantly better job placement than MIT, MIT actually has slightly better job placement. I haven’t checked the rest of the OP’s data but several other schools [Yale and Caltech] don’t seem very realistic so prospective students should look at the data with utmost caution and actually look at the data published by every school they are seriously considering.</p>
<p>“The MIT data suggested that about 90% of students either had jobs or were enrolling in graduate school at graduation.”</p>
<p>From the report: “At the time of graduation, 76.6 percent of graduating seniors and 71.5 percent of master’s graduates had accepted employment.”</p>
<p>This “employment” figure probably includes those heading to grad school, just as Chicago’s does.</p>
<p>“At the time of graduation, 76.6 percent of graduating seniors and 71.5 percent of masters graduates had accepted employment.” it also says “Nearly half of baccalaureate and 75 percent of masters graduates planned to enter the workforce immediately following graduation. Forty percent of baccalaureate and 15 percent of masters graduates planned to attend graduate or professional school.” and later on page 4 states work 49.2%, graduate/professional school 40.1%, and other 10.7%. I’m not exactly sure what to make off the difference between the two quotes perhaps the first quote includes people heading to graduate school but having a summer job between graduation and when their graduate school starts. I will ask on the MIT forum and see if I can find an explanation.</p>
<p>Either way it’s hard to see how the OP’s data could possible be correct. Even with the least charitable interpretation of the data, that 76.6% of MIT seniors were employed or going to graduate/professional school at graduation it seems extraordinarily unlikely that the figure would drop to 68% a year after graduation. For the purposes of comparison, Chicago’s figures are about 70% at graduation and around 86% a year after graduation.</p>
<p>There are so many ways of measuring these things (from an employment point of view)–how many are employed at whatever arbitrary point after graduation, how many go on to graduate school, how many rich alums, etc… Of course, if you’re somebody like Larry Ellison or the Silicon Valley types, you drop out of school and start your own company and make billions.
In general the top schools do seem to do a good job of turning out financially successful graduates.
[In</a> Pictures: Billionaire Universities - 6. University of Chicago - Forbes.com](<a href=“http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/11/harvard-stanford-columbia-business-billionaires-universities_slide_7.html]In”>In Pictures: Billionaire Universities)</p>
<p>It seems that you’re certainly correct. The figures here are suspect. It’s unfortunate that it’s so difficult to retrieve accurate data for these kinds of things.</p>
<p>The schools are likely reporting different measures of employment (for instance, including or excluding those in grad school or striving for grad school). At that, though, it’s likely that the schools at the very top of the chart are reporting the same thing. And that still has Chicago tied with Stanford and ahead of Princeton.</p>
<p>Ultimately, employment has very little to do with school reputation. It has a lot to do with the student career office, and it has a lot to do with student ambition in general. I think CAPS is precisely where it should be, and I think the student ambition at the university is quite high, among and perhaps even surpassing its upper Ivy peers.</p>
<p>I totally agree that it’s really unfortunate that accurate and comparable data is hard to come by. At least with the surveys published by schools we get a sense of how various schools stack up even if it isn’t very comparable. I also agree that it seems from the data that the University of Chicago is doing quite well. Even if it doesn’t do quite as well as MIT, that can probably be largely explained by MIT’s greater selectivity (particularly before the last couple years) and the large number of engineering majors. My initial reaction to the OP’s data several months ago was considerable shock at how poorly MIT and Caltech. It appears that was because the OP’s data seems disconnected from MIT’s (and presumably other schools as well) actual stats. Hopefully others will not be misled by the OP’s data.</p>
<p>The other thing is, even if you have accurate, comparable data, it doesn’t necessarily tell you what you really want to know. Thinking about my children and their friends, at Chicago and elsewhere, in the years immediately after college, it is clear that “employment” data would reflect a bunch of very powerful, but not consistent forces that have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the education they received and the strength of the university:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>People who want to do nonstandard things have a lot more unemployment and underemployment than people who go into fields that employ lots of people. Notwithstanding the current glut of nurses, it looks bad for a nursing school if lots of its graduates cannot find nursing jobs. People trained as accountants generally get accounting jobs. Actors? Visual artists? Not so much. But a college that only churns out nurses and accountants is going to be a much weaker college than the ones that also have some graduates acting, painting, etc.</p></li>
<li><p>The wealthier people are, the more they can hold out for the jobs they really want rather than accepting stopgap employment. Having a wealthy student body means that not everyone is going to be employed. Schools try to get around this for purposes of marketing to the middle class by defining things like “travel” as a separate plan that takes graduates out of the denominator for determining employment rate.</p></li>
<li><p>On the other hand, wealthy families can get kids jobs if they want them.</p></li>
<li><p>Lots of kids go to graduate/professional education programs because they can’t get jobs. But of course those people aren’t counted in the denominators of the employment rate figures.</p></li>
<li><p>And of course underneath all of this, there is the huge difference between having a subsistence-level McJob and having a position that makes some sort of sense in the context of an actual career that the graduate in question wants to pursue. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>Some careers take more than a year to get traction, no matter what the name on the degree is. For example, I know two Harvard grads now in their early 30s with great jobs in journalism with national publications, but both spend years after their college graduations freelancing and living hand-to-mouth (with support from their families, though). These people have great jobs in a field they love, but they couldn’t have done it if their families had not been affluent, and they probably should have been counted as unemployed a year after they left college. (And if they weren’t counted as unemployed, the data really blows.)</p>
<p>One factor JHS mentioned, but I would like to stress more, is the “practical major” aspects. For instance, schools with well reputed engineering and science majors (MIT) will have a higher job placement rate than a hard core liberal arts colleges with a focus on arts and humanities do. Even during last few years with terrible job placement rates for freshly minted college graduates, the engineering majors suffered relatively far less than, say, philosophy majors. </p>
<p>For a school without an engineering program, U Chciago is actually stacking up very well vis-a-vis its peers with more well rounded portfolio of majors (Columbia, U Penn, Duke, etc)</p>