<p>The Wall Street Journal did a survey of almost 500 large companies (they hired a total of 43,000 new graduates last year) and complied a ranking of schools from the recruiters point of view.</p>
<p>I am not sure if you need a Wall Street Journal subscription to see the article, but here is the link:</p>
<p>College</a> Rankings - WSJ.com</p>
<p>It makes for interesting reading - state schools came out on top, with Penn State being number 1.</p>
<p>Finally starting to look at measuring Universities on outcomes. I think many LAC’s and Ivy’s will say we are preparing our students for leadership and graduate schools so I think if you combine the WSJ measure with an analysis of how medical schools, law schools, business schools etc. rank schools on how well prepared their kids are for graduate school, and look at entrance test scores to those schools then I think you would have a much more meaningful ranking than the traditional USNews ranking that doesn’t look at outcomes at all.</p>
<p>before you guys get all excited, read this</p>
<p>“State universities have become the favorite of companies recruiting new hires because their big student populations … gives the companies more bang for their recruiting buck.”</p>
<p>IE if you can do only one campus recruiting visit, you get a lot more prospective hires at Penn State than you do at Penn, cause of size.</p>
<p>Thats rather different from saying “we would pick a PSU grad over a Penn grad, all other things being equal”.</p>
<p>Seriously, state schools are great and all that. I would have MORE respect for the folks advocating for them, if they didn’t post misleading things so often.</p>
<p>I’m not sure what is misleading. From what I have seen I think this report is accurate. Employers are not necessarily all clamoring for Dartmouth Sociology majors believe it or not. They are looking for intelligent, hard-working kids with skills applicable to the jobs they have. While I’m not from the mid-west from what I have seen I agree and find it interesting how highly regarded many mid-west schools are.</p>
<p>Big, mostly public, schools in high population areas. No-brainer. Lots of grads = lots of people to hire. Lots of large companies in nearby large metro areas = more positions to fill.</p>
<p>(I’m sure that U. of Nebraska grads are very popular in Nebraska. . .)</p>
<h1>4</h1>
<p>that may or may not be true. The article cited is not evidence for it however.</p>
<p>The article only shows that that recruiters going on campus, arent going to bother for a school with a relatively small pool of potential recruits.</p>
<p>as for dartmouth sociology majors, do you see what you did there? you conflated two issues - school, and major.</p>
<p>Are those recruters looking for PSU sociology majors? Or just engineering, business, etc majors at PSU. If you are looking to do sociology, are you better off at PSU or Dartmouth? And if you are looking to do sociology, does it make ANY sense to rely on oncampus recruiting, or should you use the school’s network, etc. </p>
<p>For engineers, how does PSU compare to MIT? More companies may go to visit State CollegePA than Cambridge, cause they have a better shot at landing a PSU grad than an MIT grad. Is there any evidence MIT engineering grads do less well in salaries, pct with jobs, etc than PSU engineering grads? </p>
<p>Not to say PSU isnt a great school, if you find it a good fit. And a good deal if you are instate PA. But to avoid the tippy top schools for career reasons is probably generally a poor idea.</p>
<p>"Employers are not necessarily all clamoring for Dartmouth Sociology majors believe it or not. "</p>
<p>who said they were? Straw man.</p>
<p>No surprise. The truth here is employers hiring for rank and file corporate jobs have historically not had the interest of top college grads who headed for Wall Street, consulting firms and elite corporate groups with separate recruiting. You don’t go to Harvard looking to staff your Chicago office.</p>
<p>look at the recruiter comments on the schools</p>
<p>“x is good, we actually manage to hire from their”</p>
<p>The problem for many recruiters with the tippy top schools</p>
<p>"Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded. "
Yogi Berra</p>
<p>The point of the article I think is a good one where they are taking an initial shot at trying to measure the value of a university education based on outcomes which, again, I think USNews does a very poor job of. This for me was my primary interest-how does the school prepare my child for the job market, or for a graduate school position that will then prepare them for a job.
Honestly, I don’t understand why USNews ignores this basic idea. Although, I can remember sitting in a large meeting at our kid’s private school where they were discussing college choices and after 2 hours of questions about colleges not one question had been raised about how the college prepared kids for work. All anyone seemed to care about was the “prestige” factor of the school.</p>
<p>"The point of the article I think is a good one where they are taking an initial shot at trying to measure the value of a university education based on outcomes "</p>
<p>No, thats NOT what they are doing. They are asking recruiters which schools they like to recruit at and why. In many cases that is the exact inverse of outcome (even narrowly defined) for STUDENTS.</p>
<p>Again, look at the comments. “hofstra is good to recruit at, cause those kids already KNOW how expensive NYC is” (and will take our salaries that dont adequately reflect the cost of living here). Recruiters, esp those offering lower salaries, or less prestigious jobs, have a hard time recruiting at the tippy top schools. Ergo, those schools are NOT good places for them to recruit, since sending a a recruiter is costly.</p>
<p>Why does this list ignore Upenn? It has many job-oriented colleges</p>
<p>Redroses, I think maybe the reason we have the financial mess we have now is because there are too many Dartmouth Sociology majors on Wall Street-just kidding Dartmouth Sociology majors.</p>
<p>Brooklyn where I would agree with you is that many students are not interested in a job or having to do real work.</p>
<p>"Dartmouth Sociology majors on Wall Street-just kidding Dartmouth Sociology majors. "</p>
<p>actually some of the biggest mess ups on WS were done by folks with less prestigious degrees, cause the Ivy types were going into traditional Ibanking jobs, while the firms were increasingly dominated by traders. </p>
<p>That said, we may still have too many folks in Ibanking. That does not make this article a useful measure of outcomes, however.</p>
<p>14 - where did i say that?</p>
<p>Remember, this is from the WSJ and does not necessarily represent medicine or research. I think if a kid can navigate and be successful at a big State U then they will be able to navigate corp America. Big State U doesn’t hold your hand and offers a different kind of experience than a LAC or a highly selective university…your in the the masses and the general population which is good training for life after college. Sink or swim.</p>
<p>I have two kids in high school, one a the public high school and one at a private school. My senior (public HS) has competitve stats and has a shot at some of the more selective schools. After visiting a 15 or so private and public unversities, we realized that many of the state schools had significantly better resources, facilities, and programs than most the privates…at half the cost. </p>
<p>What they didn’t have was the overall prestige in the general population…my senior’s list is heavily loaded with State universities and a couple of selective privates…her challenge has been listening to her GC and other people tell her to “aim higher”…although she has meet with the many of the Directors of the programs she is applying to, she still thinks many of the StateUs have move to offer.</p>
<p>I heard a Princeton grad, who happened to recruit for his company, say that people who are at the top at a huge school like Penn State ARE AT THE TOP. </p>
<p>They would be at the top anywhere because there is such competition when you have large numbers of people striving to be the best.</p>
<p>If the comments from state school advocates are misleading, the comments from “prestigious” school advocates are equally so.</p>
<p>No-one is saying that this article means state schools have BETTER prospects at jobs than MIT grads - it merely means that the common assumption that state school graduates have LESS prospects is not true. In fact, the article counters that there is actually more recruitment going on at state schools. </p>
<p>Whether more actually equals more “quality” (already quite subjective, but I’ll nod and go along with it for the sake of the argument) recruitment is one thing, but the opposite has not been proven either. </p>
<p>Here’s a conjecture on the other side: </p>
<p>Rather than say, companies don’t expect to staff their Chicago offices at Dartmouth, how about say, companies know they can find the staff for their Chicago office at the state school - AND they can also find top prospects who turned down Ivy Leagues or other privates because of the cost or other barriers.</p>
<p>More people at state schools doesn’t just mean more “average” people - it means plenty of Ivy League caliber students as well.</p>
<p>Sure, it’s anectdotal, but when I look at my friends and acquaintances here, a surprising number have turned down Ivies - and that’s just Ivies. If I broaden my scope to kids I know who turned down prestigious privates, they’re literally a dime a dozen (including myself).</p>
<p>The benefits of recruiting at a state school listed in the article are not LIMITATIONS (‘it’s more economical to recruit local, thus, all of the national or multinational companies with headquarters or offices in the area who have now become more keen to recruit at the state school are only recruiting for strictly local positions’ is an obvious fallacy…so too is ‘people with more practical skils can be found at state schools so companies are only recruiting for ‘practical’ jobs there’) Rather, the benefits are just icing on the already hefty cake.</p>
<p>So much misinformation in the article: referring to Stanford and MIT as Ivy League schools, describing Ivies as “elite liberal arts colleges”, and so much more.</p>
<p>I expect better from the WSJ.</p>