New College Rankings from LinkedIn

LinkedIn Joins the Rankings Scene. Exciting news! LinkedIn just launched new rankings that connect prospective students to universities based on career outcomes. Here’s how they did it (in their words) using software developers as an example: 1. First, we identified the top companies where  software developers  are choosing to work. 2. Next, we found people on LinkedIn who work as  software developers and saw where they went to school. 3. Finally, for each school, we found the percentage of these alumni whove landed  software development  jobs at these top companies, then compared the percentages to come up with the list. You can look up your prospective career, and then view the top universities with the most graduates in top companies in that prospective career. LI defines the most desirable companies as those â€Å"that are the best at attracting and retaining talent in that profession.† For example, let’s take a look at finance professionals. The following schools were ranked based on how successful recent graduates were at landing desirable finance jobs. Finance Professionals 1. University of Pennsylvania 2. Yale 3. Georgetown 4. Princeton 5. Columbia 6. NYU 7. Duke 8. Harvard 9. Cornell 10. Dartmouth For marketing professionals, the list goes as follows. Marketers 1. University of Pennsylvania 2. University of Michigan 3. Harvard 4. NYU 5. Cornell 6. Georgetown 7. Stanford 8. UC Berkeley 9. Northwestern 10. University of Texas at Austin One quick flaw that I see here is that you dont know the difference or magnitude of difference between the schools. Also some of the categories are very broad, like media professionals.† That could include writers, actors, musicians, business people – these are all people involved in media. But the concept of ranking which schools send the most grads to specific fields, or even better yet, to desirable employers in those fields is a good one IMO. You can read more about their methodology here. Related Resources: †¢Ã‚  Top 10 Colleges with the Highest Paid Grads †¢Ã‚  U.S. News 2015 Best Colleges †¢ College Admissions 101