UT Dallas Ranks #21 on LinkedIn’s “Best Universities for Software Developers”
The professional networking site, LinkedIn, recently published their rankings of universities based on how successful recent graduates have been at landing desirable jobs. In the category of “desirable software development job,” UT Dallas was ranked 21st. Carnegie Mellon University topped the rankings. Only two other Texas universities made it to top 25 (UT Austin and Rice). These rankings are intended to be used by both students and parents to gain insights regarding schools to which they would like to attend for their undergraduate education. Information regarding the potential for landing jobs subsequent to graduation can figure prominently in this decision; both parents and students want to know which schools give them the best chance at getting a job after graduation!
LinkedIn gathered the information for the ranking by identifying the top companies where software developers are currently choosing to work. The next step was to find people on LinkedIn who work as software developers and determine where they had attended university. Lastly, for each university, LinkedIn found the percentage of these alumni who have landed software development jobs at these top companies. Subsequently, LinkedIn then compared the percentages in order to determine the rankings.
In order to get a credible ranking of Universities based on the career outcomes of their alumni, LinkedIn analyzed the employment patterns for over 300 million LinkedIn members from around the world. Analyzing such a robust database enabled LinkedIn to identify the desirable jobs that were associated with several related professions and which graduates were successful at landing those desirable jobs. The end result was that LinkedIn was able to rank schools based on career outcomes of graduates. The University of Texas at Dallas ranked #21 in this list. Amongst UTD alumni the top companies of choice included Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Ericsson, IBM, AT&T, and Texas Instruments.
Jerry Alexander, Assistant Dean for Student Development, highlights the value of this ranking. “I am very pleased with this ranking. It confirms what I have observed. Our graduates are very employable. UTD is located in an area with many software, hardware and telecom companies who hire a large number of CS/SE students as interns (close to 600 last year). Nearly 100% of our graduates last year had a job by graduation time last year. We can only climb in the rankings from here on!”
More details can be found in LinkedIn’s Website.