LinkedIn Corporation's New Way To Rank Colleges And Universities

Finding the best university or college to attend has traditionally involved consulting one of several reputable "top university" lists such as the one published by U.S. News & World Report.

How schools were ranked involved what U.S. News called a "two pillar" approach consisting of "quantitative measures that education experts have proposed as reliable indicators of academic quality" and a "researched view of what matters in education."

Something Completely Different

In its rankings, LinkedIn Corporation LNKD took another approach. Given the fact most students attend college to give them a better chance to obtain a desirable job after graduation, LinkedIn started there.

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The LinkedIn system involved analyzing employment patterns of the more than 300 million LinkedIn members to determine first which jobs were most desirable.

By pairing notable graduates with those desirable jobs, researchers determined which schools produced the best career outcomes for their students. Those schools were ranked according to the results of those career outcomes.

Desirable Jobs and Companies

Based on LinkedIn data, a desirable job was a job at a company deemed desirable by being chosen by notable graduates over other companies.

One example of how a desirable company was chosen involved comparing two companies. If more employees chose to leave the first company to work for the second, the second company was deemed more desirable.

Another factor was retention. If one company tended to keep employees longer that was considered a more desirable company.

University Rankings

Once desirable jobs and companies were chosen, the next step was to determine the percentage of relevant graduates who obtained those desirable jobs.

The results produced a ranked list of universities for each job by profession.

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Best Schools for the Best Jobs

Based on LinkedIn data for career outcomes, those seeking a career in accounting would be best served by attending Villanova, Notre Dame or Boston College. 

In the field of design, best schools were Carnegie Mellon, School of Visual Arts (NYC) or the College for Creative Studies (Detroit).

Future investment bankers would do well to attend Georgetown, the University of Pennsylvania or Yale.

According to LinkedIn, students interested in marketing should consider the University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan or Harvard.

The entire LinkedIn University Rankings list can be found here.

At the time of this writing, Jim Probasco  had no position in any mentioned securities.