Every student going to college, including myself, usually refers to the U.S news rankings to choose the “best” college for him/her, but those schools are largely based on the graduate’s school success as well. So, how do employers rank university education for undergrads?
Check out the lists of companies who go to their career fairs. Shows you who values that school enough to come there specifically to recruit students.
US News engineering rankings are similar to employer rankings of universities. For highly specialized hires, they look at PhD students of well known professors in the area. Also, some universities are stronger in some areas of engineering than other. For example, Minnesota chemical eng is ranked in the top 5 nationally. For general undergrad hires, employers that are well known hire nationally from both the top 20 or so nationally ranked universities and regionally from good tier 2 engineering schools within the region. Some engineering companies with lower budgets focus only regionally on hiring.
Companies tend to know that engineering talent can be found in many places and so it isn’t necessary to attend a top engineering school although there are benefits to that. The top schools have more professors that are at the top of their research field and often are more fast paced and rigorous. But the choice of engineering at Boise State and Wisconsin for an individual engineer may only be the fate of which state a student grew up in. Rankings and reputation are highly correlated to research reputation. There are probably some less well known engineering schools that are also very rigorous but are ranked low. Engineering recruiters have no way of knowing that unless they had direct experience with grads.
To add to @bodangles point, many companies will hire locally and attend career fairs in their state. But how many come from other states to a career fair at X university will tell you something about how medium to large companies see the potential from different universities.
They don’t. For engineering jobs the look for accredited programs and colleges.
In our experience (other half is a Civil Engineer and has been for decades), many Civil Engineering places like to hire from a local region and they have their favorite schools for new hires - there can even be alumni bias. They also have schools they don’t care for based upon what they’ve see. My suggestion to those looking toward this field is to find companies they think they would want to work for and see where their employees went to school. Most will freely share this info to an interested high schooler who contacts them. Some of the students at the school where I work will also shadow an engineer for a day. It’s pretty easy to glean info that way too.
Of course, there are other fields of engineering, but I’ve never had a student steered wrong when they’ve asked those actually doing the job(s) they think they’d like.
Since we’re in southern PA, both Penn St and Va Tech are highly recommended.
Once one has been on the job and has projects of their own on their resume, college attended doesn’t matter as much. This is merely for that first job.
Some of it may have to do specifically about emphases in the major. For example, my S1 was considering two engineering schools. Both for ChemE. One was focused on wood products, the other had more on bio-fuels. Just as he used that information as part of his decision, so it goes for employers as well. If you are looking for someone to work in the wood pulp industry, you would more likely recruit at university A versus B.
Often, hiring managers will recruit from their alma mater or that of other trusted subordinates. Much is regional as well. Sometimes, gasp, universities will ‘encourage’ (financially) employers to attend their fairs in an effort to enhance the reputation of the school (and vice versa).
Don’t read too much into it unless you hope to work for a particular employer and they only typically recruit from a small handful of schools.
there are a handful of standout colleges (Caltech, MIT, Stanford, etc) would certainly be thought of as top tier. So for general engineering hires a resume from a student at such a school is going to get a look. After that there are broad tiers, based more or less on selectivity of admissions; smarter kids in, they can challenge them more. But there is not the fine shading that kids here obsess over; I doubt any employer views Santa Barbara as much different than San Diego or Irvine, to give an example, unless there is a specialty area at one of the schools the employer cares about.
As already pointed out, there is also some favoritism for schools where they have already hired from (often these schools have a few “cheerleaders” inside), which should be telling you that the rankings so near and dear to the heart on these forums doesn’t really matter; employers can get good engineers from many schools and so random issues like location and those already working at the company tip the hand of the employer.
Very likely most hiring eng’g managers do NOT know the rankings…at all…nor do they care. They know that this nation has 100s of very good eng’g schools. They often hire locally.
My company, a large R&D firm, has main offices in Boston and DC and recruits engineers locally at MIT, Northeastern, Tufts, WPI, Boston University, UMASS-Amherst, UMASS-Lowell, UConn, Virginia Tech, George Washington, Howard, George Mason, Maryland, Johns Hopkins, UVirginia.
Nationally, we recruit engineers at RPI, Cornell, Penn State, Purdue, Illinois, Michigan, Georgia Tech, and University of Puerto Rico.
In my own research group, I tend to view MIT, Cornell, Illinois, Purdue and Michigan as the largest source of recruits. There are a bunch of other schools that have some representation, and of course some people just send in their resumes and find their way to me.
We tend to do better with schools where people aren’t afraid of a little snow hence the lack of focus on California.
@ClassicRockerDad are the schools in your “nationally” list also schools you tend to accept student interns from? or do you mainly stick with local schools for those?
This depends, in part, about the level of competence of the employer’s human resources department. Some employers are clueless about quality of engineering programs and some are very knowledgeable. It also depends on the level of skill required for a particular position.
Large national companies tend to recruit at the high ranked national universities, as well as better regional ones. Financial service and consulting companies recruit from a much smaller set. Small companies recruit locally. Startups are almost exclusively local.
Employers often know that certain schools have “good engineering.” When I worked in southern Cal, it was common knowledge that CSULB, CSUFullerton, the Cal Polys, UCLA, UCB, and a few others in the area had “good engineering.” I doubt that most knew the rankings of the programs. They also hired from the Midwest and East Coast, mostly relying on an expectation that a flagship or similar had a good engineering program…again, I doubt anyone knew the eng’g rankings of - say - Iowa State or UMinn or UMaryland, etc. It was simply, “oh, yes, they’ve got a good program.”
People hire the person, not the school’s name. The eng’rs came from various Calif schools, UMich, Cornell, Purdue, MIT, GT, etc. We really didn’t notice a difference in quality of the eng’rs based on their attended school.
We hire interns from a wide variety of schools. We get plenty of resumes from people at other schools who just apply to job ads.
Should have also included CMU on my national list.
I am by no means an expert, but I would imagine that what @TooOld4School said is true. Pretty much all of my uncles are mechanical or electrical engineers, and they’ve said similar. Your big corporations typically know the top tier programs (MIT, Stanford, Cal Tech, GT, UCB). Local companies, however, just hire the local applicants that they’re familiar with. For example, a young start up company near kenessaw hires mostly from a local community college or KSU.
This (#2) is exactly my experience with my employer.
Many engineers themselves applied to college in the US at one time. Many form their initial notions from that process, just like everyone else who applies to non-engineering colleges. These then get modified as they go through college: find out where their professors went, who wrote their textbooks, general “buzz” derived through the educational process. Then they go to work, see where their firms recruit from, who their colleagues are and where they went. See which places have good graduate programs in their field. So by the time they are hiring managers I believe most have a pretty good handle on what the “good” engineering programs are. Though many probably feel it doesn’t matter much for undergrad hiring; good people come from many schools; engineering is a very non-elitist field. And a lot of engineers went to state universities.
A long time ago I worked for two big firms in the Midwest, one an engineering firm, the other in a Fortune 500 firm.
The first recruited for engineers at every school with a program locally, then at the “good” ones regionally. Out of region they only visited a handful of schools : MIT, Cornell, RPI, Georgia Tech I think. Maybe a couple others. That said, at the end of the day probably half their engineers came from a single state U with a great engineering program located about two hours away.
The Fortune 500 firm hired from basically every school locally, and certain big state Universities regionally. Period.
They got financial engineering types mostly from two not local but regional state Universities known to have lots of bright people and expertise in our field. For engineers they hired mostly from the two state universities they were located in that were “known” to have the better engineering programs in the state. But other local programs too.
For many companies, the costs of recruiting yield and expense, employee retention, and I guess relocation costs too, are considerations. This biases them towards more locally proximate recruits.
Particularly where the local talent pool is deemed “good enough”, or as good as they’d get anyplace else, for their available jobs. At company #2 they didn’t want to go to hot-shot places out of region because few of those people would want to take those jobs in that location. And if they came, and found that they weren’t instantly vaulting up the corporate ladder, they might be more likely to leave.That doesn’t mean that company #2’s hiring managers were completely unaware of which the “hotshot” schools were.
At our engineering firm, as long as it is ABET accredited we are far more interested in GPA for someone straight out of college and if it is past that, work history. Especially for undergrad. A certain college might dictate a higher starting salary but there are few, if any, that would keep one from getting an interview.
I’ll hire an electrical engineer from North Dakota who went there to take advantage of a free ride and worked a part time side job to pay for his books, over someone whose parents paid full price for a “name” school and didn’t do anything beyond studying and REU, any day of the week. More often than not, the “name” graduates come with attitudes and entitlements that make them less than ideal team players.
It is all about the person.