The professional social network used an innovative method to come up with the ranking. It found people on the website who listed themselves as working in finance, broke that down by the university he or she attended, and ranked each university in terms of how "desirable" the jobs that their alumni had.
The LinkedIn researchers explain their methodology:
"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... Since not every graduate is interested in the same profession, it is only fair to define the relevant graduates as those who end up working in that career. For example, while ranking a school for the category 'Investment Bankers', we only consider graduates from that school who work as investment bankers."
Below are the top 25 schools for the whole financial profession. The top 25 for investment bankers - which is very similar to the list below - can be found here.
- University of Pennsylvania
- Yale University
- Georgetown University
- Princeton University
- Columbia University
- New York University
- Duke University
- Harvard University
- Cornell University
- Dartmouth College
- University of Notre Dame
- Wake Forest University
- Villanova University
- Boston College
- Wellesley College
- Amherst College
- Brown University
- Lehigh University
- Rice University
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- Rutgers University
- Emory University
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- University of Michigan