BU Grads Ranked among the World’s Most Employable

BU’s Center for Career Development hosts several career fairs throughout the year where employers come to campus to recruit students. Photo by Kalman Zabarsky

Good news for BU students and alums: you have some serious clout with employers worldwide.

Last week, the employability of BU graduates was ranked 11th in the world and 7th in the nation in a report published in Times Higher Education. The Global University Employability Ranking 2016 was designed by French human resources company Emerging, which sent an online survey asking the opinions of thousands of recruiters at a management level and of managing directors of international companies.

The California Institute of Technology was ranked number one on the list, followed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, the University of Cambridge, and Stanford University.

“It’s very heartening that so many employers recognize that our graduates are very well-prepared in their fields and have the skills and habits to perform at a high level,” says President Robert A. Brown. “Helping to successfully launch the careers of our graduates is a focus of the University.”

Part one of the two-part survey questioned management-level recruiters who had experience hiring or working with graduates. Each person was given a list of local universities (with the option to add more) and had up to 15 votes to cast for the universities in their country that they think produce the best grads, in terms of employability. Recruiters with experience scouting internationally were also asked to choose from a global list of universities that they considered the best in the world when it comes to employability of graduates.

Part two of the survey was sent to 3,450 managing directors of international companies, who could vote for a maximum of 10 local and global universities that had been determined by the first panel. The managing directors could also add universities if they chose.

Global rankings were determined by an aggregation of votes, which were converted to scores.

Both panels consisted of recruiters and directors from 20 countries, among them Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Most participants had at least 10 years of experience in the workplace and worked at a firm with more than 500 employees. More than half recruited internationally.

Rankings editor Phil Baty noted that in the current political climate, the name of a school on a résumé is increasingly important. “In a year of huge political upheaval, where young students have witnessed Brexit and the unexpected election of Donald Trump as US president, many will seek the relative safety of a university with a strong track record of producing graduates who are valued by large international graduate employers,” he says.

For BU, this most recent ranking follows U.S. News & World Report’s placement of the University in the 32nd spot in this year’s assessment of global universities, and 39th among national universities. In October, the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education put BU at 42nd overall in the United States, based on metrics that valued student outcomes, resources, and engagement. In the Reuters ranking of the world’s most innovative universities, BU came in at number 41. And in a first-ever ranking by Forbes, the University was named the 17th best college in the United States for international students.