<p>“The latter are likely to be better positioned for career success ten to twenty years later than the student with a bachelor’s degree who took an entry-level job after learning about a company from an on-campus recruiter.”</p>
<p>Do you have numbers to back that up? How are you defining success? I understand that those with advanced degrees are likely to earn more $ on average. But in the businesses I’ve done work with, many folks take a couple of years to work after school and then return for an MBA. Or get a Masters or MBA while working. Also, I know quite a few kids who are currently at state schools so that they can AFFORD medical school. Or law school for that matter. I imagine this trend will continue given the economy. </p>
<p>So if you think the results are flawed, let’s not fall into the same trap of narrow looks and assumptions. Different strokes for different folks. And the selective route is not necessarily the best route to success in a career.</p>
<p>basically, 842 firms were contacted and asked to rank–from the pool of schools each actively recruited–the ten that produced graduates most able to succeed when hired. the first place school on each recruiters list received ten points; the tenth place school received one. these numbers were then weighted based on the number of hires that recruiting company made (presumably by multiplying the points awarded by the number of hires, but this isnt explicit). the weighted points for each company were then summed to arrive at the published ranking.</p>
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<p>how anyone could expect this survey methodology to produce results much different than those published is beyond me. </p>
<p>larger schools are going to have more active recruiters and thus more opportunity to land in the top 10 of any given list. duh. mind you, this doesnt mean that there are more active recruiters per student or more anticipated interviews/hirings per student… just more active recruiters.</p>
<p>larger schools are also going to have more of their graduates hired by these companies and thus will receive larger weightings than smaller schools. duh. again, this doesnt mean that a larger percentage of students are being actively recruited, just that ‘company x’ hired more arizona state graduates than william & mary graduates. brilliant.</p>
<p>Reminds me of how the undergraduate major with the highest average starting salary for much of the time a decade or so ago was Geography. That’s because Michael Jordan’s major was Geography. Only a handful of graduates combined with one huge salary = highest average.</p>
<p>"how anyone could expect this survey methodology to produce results much different than those published is beyond me. "</p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon is not a very big school and it’s in the top ten schools. Cornell is not huge. There are plenty of HUGE schools that are NOT on the list. So it’s not just scale - but scale DOES have a impact. I would say that the study simply points out that going to a well-regarded large state school with an occupational focus (business, engineering, etc) is not a bad strategy if you want to be employed when you graduate, and if those fields are a good fit for you. Certainly, I don’t think going to a small school for engineering or accounting would be a bad approach…although some folks might argue that it’s not worth it if you have to go into lots of debt. And - in these economic times, it IS true that you won’t have as many recruiters visiting a small campus. Cuts in budgets are hitting recruiters too. Yeah, common sense but it’s worth pointing out to kids who are in the process of looking at schools.</p>
<p>the problem is that the numbers do not appear to be normalized in such a way as to make this a justifiable claim. does the hypothetical of ‘company x’ hiring 40 graduates from a school with 50,000 students but only 30 from a school with 5,000 really suggest that the larger school is better recruited? or the hypothetical of the 50,000 student school being recruited by 200 of the contacted employers (with intention to hire 2000 graduates) compared to the 5,000 student school being recruited by only 100 of them (with the intention to hire 1000 graduates). </p>
<p>at which of these schools would you say a given graduate has a better chance of getting a job as a result of on-campus recruitment? now, graduate ‘quality’ rankings held constant, which of these schools would do better in these rankings? </p>
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<p>mind you, i am NOT suggesting that large publics would or should do poorly here. rather, i am suggesting that the poll results were aggregated and presented in a way that is NOT particularly useful. the goal is to find gainful employment, not to accumulate the largest possible number of free pens at a career fair. it would be interesting to know if there are any particular benefits to attending a large school in this regard (and i suspect there may well be), just as it would be interesting to know the impact of alumni-based recruiting at a school with a huge–but less strong–network compared to a smaller, stronger one. but this this ‘study’ represents a very poor attempt to that end.</p>
<p>The way that companies recurit can vary a great deal from firm to firm. If you were to ask me, I suspect the one big factor is how many of the firms represented on the list are within geographical proximity to the school. If you go to Penn State, or UCLA, there are certain to be a number of compaines on the list within a short commute of your school. </p>
<p>For many companies, especially small to medium sized organizations, that not only affects where the company recruits, but who actually comes to work at the company. As far as I know, my own organization only goes to the “College Fairs” at local schools, although we hire from all over, including many from the Ivy Leagues. But we are a state agency, so likely somewhat different from private industry.</p>
<p>Note the survey appears to give extra weight based on the number of “hires”, not offers. My assumption is that graduates are more likely to accept positions close to their alma mater.</p>
<p>I guess what I am saying is that the whole issue of recruiting and hiring is pretty complicated. But at least this shows that graduates of good state schools needn’t despair.</p>
<p>Just a note…PSU is three hours from any major city (Philly, Pitt, NY) and flights are hard to come by so it’s not an easy deal for recruiters.</p>
<p>Erica…I hear what you’re saying. The weighting is having a big impact - although the method they used is unclear. I do think recruiter views on quality of students are pretty important though…as they’re usually related to the satisfaction of employers with employees they have placed from that school. If the word is good on a particular school…they tend to want to go back to that well. In fact, many folks reading this survey may not pick it apart like what’s going on here…giving the schools on top a bit of boost from a recruiters standpoint. May result in more apps from students too…time will tell.</p>
<p>And to build on EricatBucknell’s argument- my observation is that if employment after graduation is your top priority in picking a school, a kid should choose between West Point and the other academies, Notre Dame/Holy Cross or BYU.</p>
<p>In a bad economy, we go to campuses with pretty rigid hiring targets. In a good economy, those are lessened, i.e. we intend to make 6 offers to get 5 hires, but are so impressed with what we see that we make 10 offers and end up with 8 hires and so we’re still happy. But we never choose a campus thinking, “oh gosh, with 20,000 students we’ll be able to hire our entire target at this one school and can then take the rest of the season off”. We don’t want every single employee coming from one institution, however massive it is, and frankly, our prestige would suffer very quickly if we dug too deep into any particular class of students, no matter how terrific they were.</p>
<p>Our recruiting teams in Europe function very differently. They can actually recruit at 2-3 universities in a country and be done with it, other than handling ex-pats and transfers. But the secondary schools in Europe do the sifting by tracking kids at a very early age.</p>
PSU is centrally located to several big cities, although not extremely close to any of them. The distance from PSU to Pittsburgh is about the same as it is from my office (Downtown LA) to San Diego. That is certainly not a long distance to drive for a day of recruiting- in fact I drive it frequently in the course of my work, all in a day. Las Vegas would be a little different.</p>
<p>Alothough I have no data to back it up, I think it is probably fair to assume that PSU gets a lot more recruiters from Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and New York than, say, Reed College. And I don’t think location doesn’t play a big part in that.</p>
<p>you obviously have never driven between Pitt and PSU if you think it is like a drive between LA and San Diego.</p>
<p>Yes, I-5 has lots of traffic some times of day. It is also a straight shot and flat as a board. </p>
<p>Pitt to PSU? anywhere to PSU? One hilly curvy drive. From most locations, it is either secondary two/four lane roads or a long drive on I 80 (a lovely piece of road if you like waiting behind trucks climbing hills…)</p>
<p>No one in their right mind would do a day trip to PSU from a major city, unless they like leaving at 5 Am and getting home after dark.</p>
Sometimes? I always go in the AM when there is lots fo traffic and return in the PM.
It takes three hours. I also drive to Bakersfield and back in a day - you think there aren’t trucks on that route?</p>
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Yeah, that’s what I do. I don’t think that is a horrible trek a couple days out of a year for a college recruitment visit. But maybe I’m not in my right mind.</p>
<p>I don’t know if you have some sort of vested interest in PSU - I’m sure it is a fine school. Take PSU out of the mix if that is a problem for some reason. My point is that relative geographical proximity has a lot to do with where some organizations recruit. I know that for a fact based on my last three places of employment.</p>
<p>Many college’s career centers do placement survey to their recent graduates. Isn’t that survey more meaningful than polling the recruiters? I’m always wondering how come we never have a ranking list that based on the survey, which shows -</p>
<p>1) number of respondents to the survey. (The non-respondents are tend to be, arguably, the students that don’t have job offer yet)</p>
<p>2) percentage of students have job offer upon graduation and 6 month after gruduation</p>
<p>3) whether job related to their majors, (just to differentiate those have to take a temp job while still looking for a permanent one)</p>
<p>"Many college’s career centers do placement survey to their recent graduates. Isn’t that survey more meaningful than polling the recruiters? I’m always wondering how come we never have a ranking list that based on the survey, which shows "</p>
<p>the career center surveys arent all written or distributed the same way, AFAIK, which would introduce bias.</p>
<p>I noticed that. Some college just leave out the % of correspondents (on purposely?). Why can they normalize it just like they fill out the common data set. All they need is post the results of the three questions I listed in my earlier post.</p>
<p>Career center surveys can be all over the board. As a prospective parent or student, I would still ask for the data though. </p>
<p>No news here…but there are problems will ALL surveys and ranking systems. I guess I agree with some of the crankiness on this board after going back and looking at the assertions from the WSJ survey (recruiters like state grads best…yada yada). I guess there’s a compelling need for the media to boil it down to a “teaser.” Anyway, as a parent of a PSU grad, I’m just happy there’s something to counter that stupid party school ranking at this point.</p>
<p>I’d be interested to see statistics on the percent of graduating classes that go on to professional/grad school, the percent that have jobs right out of college, and the percent that are unemployed. </p>
<p>As an aside, Ga Tech has a very well established network of co-op opportunities for its students and a strong job fair/recruiting/career placement program. No surprise to me that they have a good relationship with several major corporations and have good success in placing students.</p>