Headed to college soon and already know what you want to be when you grow up? Good for you. That alone will put you ahead of many of your university classmates.
But now there is an extra tool you can use to help you decide which college is best to attend to get the job you want in the profession you want. The folks over at the online job network LinkedIn have combed their huge database of users (more than 300 million), looking at the profiles of various alumni to see how different schools stack up across different careers.
They looked at “desirable jobs” in various professions (desirable being defined as companies that people in a given industry found as a desirable company for that industry) and noted which companies were attracting employees and which companies were good at retaining employees. Then, it looked at the relevant graduates who went into a specific field.
And finally, as the company explained in a recent blog post, “we calculated the percentage of relevant graduates who have obtained desirable jobs and took those percentages to rank universities based on career. These percentages allow us to rank universities based on career outcomes across different professional areas.”
So what does that mean for you? Well, if you’ve decided that you want a desirable job as a software developer when you grow up, your top three best bets for schools are:
1) Carnegie Mellon University
2) Caltech
3) Cornell
If, however, accounting is more your thing, LinkedIn suggests:
1) Villanova University
2) University of Notre Dame
3) Boston College
Have your sights set on becoming a media professional? Try these three schools:
1) New York University
2) Hofstra College
3) Duke University
There are rankings for universities in the United States as well as Canada and the United Kingdom. See what schools may be the best for finding a desirable job in your chosen field now.