Top Schools for the Career Focused

Outcomes matter more than ever for consumers

The release of this week’s Strada Foundation survey of student and parent perception around education proved to be another fairly negative critique of higher education. While another negative press release on higher education isn’t necessarily newsworthy, we feel that any 5,000 plus respondent survey is worth looking at and the Strada Survey proved to be interesting to us in other ways.

While the Strada survey focused primarily on access and affordability what jumped out at us were the questions related to the reasons students attend college. The top six reasons for attending college in the Strada survey were job and career oriented, a result that looks to be a continuation of a trend away from education as a way to broaden one’s world view, grow or becoming a better person.

To the degree that the reasons for attending college are increasingly financial and transactional in nature, we thought it would be a good time to revisit college career service efforts and outcomes, a topic we last looked at in 2023.

Unfortunately, much like the last time we looked at this topic, industry data that would allow for clear analysis continues to be somewhat lacking as every school highlights their career outcome and development efforts, but most provide no compelling supporting information. Nevertheless, there are a number of surveys and data sets that we believe do a credible job of highlighting the better efforts with data sources that give them some credibility. We specifically like the work done by Georgetown’s Center of Education and the Workforce, the Department of Education, The Financial Times Education, The Princeton Review and Linked In’s new survey.

Much like in our 2023 article we thought that a good way to look for the schools with the best career outcomes would be to focus on the ones mentioned favorably in all five or in four of the five sources. While there are not any real surprises related to the names on the list, it confirms the schools that are truly elite while perhaps exposing the names that would otherwise be seen as peers ...as a bit less than that.

Schools mentioned favorably by all five sources.

Babson, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford and Penn.

Schools mentioned favorably by four sources

Berkley, Caltech, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Northwestern, UCLA, Vanderbilt, University of Washington and Yale