Recruiters Lean Toward Ivy League Schools

In order to be more efficient, recruiters are always under pressure to streamline their hiring processes as well as cut costs. To match budget constraints, it seems as though recruiters are focusing more on the larger schools and almost ignoring the rest.

To recruit 100 college grads, recruiters costs reach upwards to half a million dollars when you tally up advertising costs, recruiter salaries and travel expenses. The latest trend is to cut down their recruiting rosters so they are travelling to fewer campuses.

This is having a definite impact on students since there is now a selectiveness developing among recruiters. Before deciding on a school, some students are inquiring about companies who recruit on their campus, i.e. GE (General Electric); most interns selected from a roster of 40 key schools end up as grad recruits.

Rather than the exclusive liberal Ivy League schools like Harvard, Dartmouth and Stanford, most recruiters tend to prefer state schools. Why?

In order to pursue their doctorate degrees, the majority of Harvard graduates tend to leave their first jobs in a year or less.
While the Ivy League schools generally have less than a thousand, state schools have thousands of graduates every year. Therefore often overlook the Ivy schools because they are going for the bigger numbers.
Some of these schools lack the bread-and-butter courses that serve well in the industry.

Although this would lead you to believe that Ivy League graduates don’t do well in the job market, they usually do better than average. Because schools like Harvard which is ranked 4^th in the world for business and economics; and Carnegie Mellon, which is ranked number 1 in the world for computer science, many recruiters favor these schools above the rest for specific majors.

Schools that are close in proximity are what many recruiters tend to focus on because they provide easy-access to interns throughout the year and save on travel expenses. Another reason and one that saves the recruiters a ton of money on relocation costs is there is a higher chance of the new hires being from the area.

Here are the top 5 schools that recruiters currently favor:

Penn State
Texas A&M
University of Illinois
Purdue University
Arizona State

Source: www.wsj.com