Just about every college and university offers a computer science or engineering program these days. That’s thousands of schools in the US alone! No matter the size of your company’s university recruiting team, it’s simply not possible to develop a relationship with each of these schools to build your early talent pipeline. The question is, then—which schools do you target?
The unfortunate truth is that many companies tend to rely on pedigrees when it comes to university recruiting, reinforcing an uneven distribution of opportunities. The students who go to the “best” schools are often the ones who get access to the prestigious internships and new grad jobs that lead to more career opportunities later on. But are the most prestigious schools really the ones producing the top technical talent?
That’s the question we set out to answer when we conducted the research for our 2021 CodeSignal University Ranking Report, the first university ranking based on students’ objective coding skills.
The report analyzed the results of our General Coding Assessment (GCA), a widely adopted standardized test for core programming and computer science knowledge, and ranked universities based on the percentage of students who took the GCA that scored over an 800 (equivalent to the 84th percentile).
Here are some of the highlights of what we learned:
- Only two out of the 10 schools (MIT and Carnegie Mellon) from our list were in the US News & World Report Best Undergraduate Engineering Program Rankings top 10.
- Miami University of Ohio and California State University, Sacramento aren’t included at all in the US News & World Report’s ranking (which has over 200 schools).
- SUNY Stony Brook is ranked #65 by US News & World Report; Drexel is ranked #94.
- UC Berkeley and Stanford, tied for #2 in the US News & World Report ranking, don’t make CodeSignal’s top 10.
To see our top 30 ranked universities in the US and learn more about how we came up with the rankings, you can download the full report for free.