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LinkedIn Ranks the Best Undergrad Accounting Programs Based on Employability

Another day, another ranking. This time, LinkedIn did the math and figured out which accounting school tops the list in jobs. Makes sense, isn't that why you go to college in the first place?

Here's how LinkedIn analyzed the ranking:

  1. First, we identified the top companies where Accounting Professionals are choosing to work.
  2. Next, we found people on LinkedIn who work as Accounting Professionals and saw where they went to school.
  3. Finally, for each school, we found the percentage of these alumni who've landed Accounting jobs at these top companies, then compared the percentages to come up with the list.

How did they figure out "top companies"? Glad you asked!

Defining “desirable jobs”
We define a desirable job to be a job at a desirable company for the relevant profession. For example, we define desirable finance jobs as finance jobs at companies desirable for finance professionals.

We start with identifying desirable companies for each profession.We let the career choices of our members tell us how desirable it is to work at a company. To illustrate this, imagine there are two companies, A and B. If more finance professionals are choosing to leave company A to work at company B, the data indicates that getting a finance job at B is more desirable. This is based on the hypothesis that when a professional moves from one company to another, she gives the company she moves to a strong vote of confidence.

Similarly, the ability of a company to retain its employees is a strong indicator of that employer’s attractiveness. So, hypothetically, if A and B are both attracting external employees at similar rates, but A has a much larger employee turnover than B, the data would show B to be a more desirable employer.

In other words, the most desirable companies in a profession are those that are the best at attracting and retaining talent in that profession.

Now, let's get to that ranking.

So Villanova has the most graduates working in the most desireable accounting jobs? Is that how we are supposed to read this?