Given the astronomical price tag on a college degree today, you’d better hope getting one actually pays off.
For a measure of that, it can be helpful to look at schools’ track records when it comes to offering job prospects. Today (Nov. 16), the UK’s Times Higher Education-one of the most respected sources in global college rankings-released a list of universities that produce the most employable graduates, using a survey designed by French human resources company Emerging.
Researchers asked hundreds of recruiters across 22 countries about which schools they felt offered the most hireable students.
The most represented countries in the ranks are the US, UK, France, Germany, and Switzerland-but Asian countries are steadily rising. British universities have fallen this year versus 2016, which the report speculates is due to wariness about Brexit among world’s major companies.
Schools like Cambridge, Harvard, and MIT top the list due to a combination of history, reputation, and well-rounded curriculums. (Here are the full rankings and explanations.)
| Top 25 schools in 2017 global employability ranking |
|---|
| 1. California Institute of Technology |
| 2. Harvard University |
| 3. Columbia University |
| 4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| 5. University of Cambridge |
| 6. Boston University |
| 7. Stanford University |
| 8. Technical University of Munich |
| 9. University of Tokyo |
| 10. Yale University |
| 11. Princeton University |
| 12. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology |
| 13. University of Toronto |
| 14. Peking University |
| 15. University of Oxford |
| 16. National University of Singapore |
| 17. Imperial College London |
| 18. McGill University |
| 19. Tokyo Institute of Technology |
| 20. University of California |
| 21. Australian National University |
| 22. École Polytechnique |
| 23. HEC Paris |
| 24. IE University |
| 25. King’s College London |
Take this list with a little grain of salt. Dozens of university rankings are published every year using vastly different methodologies, and they often clash with one another. Actual employability, of course, is far less about your alma mater than it is your actual skills and abilities. Just ask Google.
