Times Higher Education published the list of the 150 best universities for delivering work-ready graduates – The Global University Employability Ranking 2016.
There is a number institutions at the top of the ranking – including California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, followed by University of Cambridge (UK), Stanford University (USA), Yale University (USA), University of Oxford (UK), Technical University of Munich (Germany), Princeton University (USA) and University of Tokyo (Japan).
The survey was conducted by Emerging, a consulting company from France. To produce the Global University Employability Ranking, an online survey was completed by two panels of participants. Both panels included respondents from 20 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, the UK and the US. The first panel consisted of recruiters at a management level who had experience of hiring or working with graduates, while the second panel consisted of 3,450 managing directors of international companies.
In the survey, the participants define employability as “a set of job-related aptitudes, attitudes and behaviours”, as well as “the readiness of graduates, immediately after graduation, for entry level positions in their chosen field of study”. The employability further implies “the graduates’ capacity to find a job very quickly after graduating”.
Most employers are clear that professional experience and a high degree of specialisation are the best predictors of employability in graduates. Out of six skills/experiences that employers are looking for, the career advisers put the professional experience as the most important predictor and graduation from the world’s most prestigious universities as the least important of a number of predictors of graduate’s employability (although its value is unquestionable).